Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we are living in an age of globalisation and digitalisation, and we talk about a knowledge-based society. The whole of our society, our economic life, is on the threshold of major structural changes. What we have become used to is disappearing; things are changing. A policy to establish a regulatory framework is now more pressing than ever. The European Union has set itself the ambitious target of becoming the most dynamic economic region in the world by 2010. To this end, a number of conditions need to be met and we need to do our homework. The policy on training has already been addressed on a number of occasions. The resource Europe has is knowledge. This is where we must invest in our young people, in particular. We talk about new technologies such as the Internet. But we also need to talk about equipping people with new ways of thinking. My generation and the generation before that did not concern itself very much with the idea of being independent or becoming an entrepreneur. I think in future we should make young people in school more aware of this idea so that it becomes quite natural for them to embark upon an independent life. But we also need to talk about flexibility in our labour markets. I fully concur with Mr Bullmann, when he talks of targets, but we are constantly experiencing just how little targets match up with concrete actions. We are all in agreement on the objective of making labour more flexible. But if we take a look at Germany and the new Industrial Constitution Act, then we realise that targets and actions do not always tally, which makes it all the more difficult simply to orient policies towards targets. We also need to make more effort in the area of high technology. The Internet has been mentioned. Access to the Internet in Europe is still too expensive. Its use in comparison with other countries is still too limited. Our approach to new technologies, such as biotechnology, needs to be more aggressive and more optimistic. But we should not restrict our investments to new technologies. We should also consider how to bridge the gap between the new economy and the old economy. I am fundamentally opposed to this demarcation. In Bavaria there is a carpenter who already achieves 70% of his sales via the Internet. If I may ask the experts here, does he belong to the old economy or to the new economy? I think he simply belongs to the economy. We need to bring them together and make them viable. But – and I would like to warmly congratulate Mr Gasòliba i Böhm on his report on deregulation – we need to become competitive. We need to make our structures competitive. We have had very positive experiences when it comes to air transport, telecommunications and energy, and other markets such as transport, gas, the postal services and finances are also being considered. Ultimately though, our goal must be to have competition only where it benefits the consumer. I would like to offer a word of warning that not every sector should be deregulated straight away just for the sake of positive competitiveness. An example is water. Water is a limited resource. We certainly cannot abandon the water market in Europe, with its high quality standard, to the vagaries of competition overnight in a sector specific or even case specific way. In this connection I support the issue of limiting competition – of limiting general European competition law to local and regional public services. Social structures and evolved structures are a form of capital for Europe: good training, good health, social tranquillity. We should not maintain structures just for the sake of maintaining them, we must develop them further; they can incorporate competitive elements. We can make them more effective and structure them positively. But we must not abandon political responsibility. It is a difficult balancing act. We will raise this issue again later in the year in the liberalisation debates in this House. But I think it must be possible to combine competition, subsidiarity and political answerability on the ground. I believe this is the route Europe must take to become more competitive and yet maintain cohesion.

Political group: PPE-DE