By Xinhua
Brussels : The President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso has urged European Union (EU) member states to reach agreement on the Reform Treaty – a watered-down version of the rejected EU constitution – and respond to globalisation.
Barroso made the appeal at a press conference Wednesday ahead of the meeting of EU heads of states Oct 18-19 in Lisbon, being held to approve the treaty.
“The informal summit will address two crucial issues: the Reform Treaty and Europe’s response to globalisation,” he said, adding, “We need a decisive response on both”.
On the treaty, he said: “My message is clear. We need to put this institutional debate behind us. We cannot spend all our time discussing institutions. We have spent six years discussing the institutional architecture. It is time to move on.
“We have a good agreement on the table,” Barroso said, “I believe it is the best deal that is on offer.”
He said the EU “needs the Reform Treaty to give our citizens a Europe that is equipped with strong and effective institutions that enhance our capacity to act. Not a treaty for the sake of a treaty, but an instrument to deliver policies for the 21st century.
“I therefore appeal to all heads of state and government to honour the commitment that they made in June,” he said. “There are no reasons, no excuses not to solve this issue this week.”
The informal EU summit in Lisbon is supposed to approve the treaty, but some problems and obstacles potentially blocking its approval have remained.
The EU foreign ministers failed Monday and Tuesday at a Luxembourg meeting, which was designed to make preparations for the summit, to solve problems mainly coming from Poland, Britain and Italy.
Poland demands a clause to be written in the treaty text, the so-called Ioannina mechanism that allows a minority group of states disagreeing with a resolution to freeze it for a considerable period of time.
Italy is urging the EU leaders not to vote for the redistribution of the seats in the European Parliament because the distribution, based on each state’s population, would give Italy fewer seats than France and Britain.
Britain would not give up its ‘red lines’, which cover national sovereignty in justice and home affairs, insisting that it would not sign up to the part of the Reform Treaty that deals with security.
“A new Treaty should finalise the debate on changing institutions,” Barroso said, adding that it would allow “us to concentrate on changing Europe and changing the world for the better.
“The question we face is how we can move on from the Reform Treaty to the reform of Europe,” he said.
On Europe’s response to globalisation, the commission president said that the Union’s overriding purpose in 2007 “is clearly to shape and respond to globalisation, in the European interest, in the interest of our citizens”.
He said that it was the theme of the paper “The European interest: succeeding in the age of globalisation” that his commission submitted for discussion by EU leaders in Lisbon.