Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this speech is the last I shall deliver in this Chamber as a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. I have been a member of this Committee for 22 years. From tomorrow, I shall be a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defence Policy. I am convinced that the next step on the road to the realisation of the European Union must be political union. I look forward to working on this task in future. Looking back over these years, I would like to start by recalling our colleague Basil de Ferranti, now sadly deceased, who at that time drafted the first reports on the creation of the internal market and thereby initiated this whole development. It started off as a working party on technical barriers to trade, later spawning the Kangaroo Group. These were the first initiatives towards creating the internal market. Jacques Delors was at that time the chairman of Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, in other words, Mrs Randzio-Plath, our predecessor; he then, as French Finance Minister and later as President of the European Commission, laid the foundations on which these ideas were to become realities. I wish also to recall Jacques Moreau who, together with me back then in 1984, presented the first report of the European Parliament on proposals for the creation of the internal market. Seeing the enthusiasm that greeted the euro on 1 January, welcoming this new currency for 300 million people in the European Union, we have to recall, on the one hand, how difficult was the road to this. On the other hand, though, we also have to ask ourselves what conditions are required for the euro, our common currency, to be successful in the long term? Let me here list three conditions. The first is the consistent development of the Stability and Growth Pact. It is indeed almost ironic that we see today that it was Germany, my homeland, that campaigned most vigorously then for this Stability and Growth Pact with its strict criteria, and that one can, or must, almost take it for granted in the present situation that Germany will be the first country to be affected by this treaty's sanctions. I take the view, though, that we must be consistent here if we want the euro to become and remain a stable currency in the long term and interest rates in the European Union to remain low in the long term for our enterprises, as a condition of investment and growth. The second condition is that, in the Member States and in the EU, we make economic policy in accordance with principles held in common. It was by a large majority the will of Parliament that these principles should be those of the social market economy. Thirdly, we must move forward to political union. We said before Maastricht that we wanted monetary union and political union at the same time. Even then we were saying that monetary union cannot exist in the long term without political union. We must stay consistent on this point. It is now that we must take these steps to political union, at the core of which is a common foreign and security policy. I would like, finally, to pick up on something Jacques Delors said. Jacques Delors, during the interminable debates we had on the European internal market, once remarked, and quite rightly, that you could not fall in love with an internal market. In other words, there is very little emotion involved. I would also say that the same applies to a currency, although there are some of us who have a very emotional, almost erotic, relationship with the currency. What we need, though, and what we must bring to light, is the awareness of a common European identity, Europe-consciousness. I believe that is surely the most important task facing us as the European Parliament. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE