XVIth EPP CONGRESS The EPP: Your Majority in Europe 4 - 5 February 2004 European Parliament BRUSSELS

Speech by the Hon Edward Fenech-Adami, Prime Minister of Malta
Chairman of the Nationalist Party

Brussels, February 5, 2004



Malta has a paradoxical distinction among the accession countries. It took, on the one hand, the hardest struggle for our pro-accession lobby to win the referendum, however, on the other hand, the Maltese referendum had the highest participation of voters. I hope that the intense interest in European Affairs shown in Malta when the Euro-sceptics were at their most vocal will not abate now that they have accepted the imminent reality of Malta’s EU membership.

Of course, both parties in Malta agree that we have fewer seats in the European Parliament than are necessary for effective participation, and we are grateful for the support that the European People’s Party has given us in this matter. In Malta’s ongoing effort to gain more seats, I feel that our main point of differentiation from our opponents and our winning card has now to be the European People’s Party Programme and Manifesto.

There are two features of this programme that I would like to highlight. They reflect the two most characteristic principles of Christian democracy: subsidiarity and solidarity, but updated and transformed in the light of the conjuncture in which Europe finds itself at present, and of the trajectory it wishes to follow in the future.

I take it that the objective of this trajectory is giving a different slant to globalisation, away from uniformity and towards a rich diversity within unity.

As far as subsidiarity is concerned, the required updating was due to the increasing recognition that the European Union is an original kind of political unit. It is neither a state, nor an international organisation, but a multi-level network, in the meaning which this term has in both biology and informatics.

Subsidiarity is therefore to be interpreted not in terms of a hierarchical, pyramidal structure, but of a network. European level authorities are not supreme and over-riding in all areas. In some areas, the national authorities have final competence; in others, this lies with regional or local authorities. Sometimes the greatest power may even lie with extra-governmental entities.

In this context subsidiarity is not best expressed in terms of a vertical model, in terms of higher or lower levels, but in terms of where there is most concentration of information and criss-crossing of expertise, that is, of nodes where powers intersect. Such a node is the Union’s new position of Minister for external affairs, a point of convergence of the competence of both Council and Commission. So too are, in their own way, the Committees, which have come to play such a vital part in the life of the Union. The Manifesto does not declare, but it makes implicitly perceptible, this new face of subsidiarity.

Secondly, solidarity in our Manifesto is modulated into the concept of inclusiveness. The European social model has reached a point where the disadvantaged are no longer such clear-cut collectivities as ‘classes’, but they are rather groups or individuals who drop out of the knowledge society or become emarginated by social progress. In this context, inclusiveness is the new name of the solidarity that our Manifesto presents to contemporary Europe. Inclusiveness is to social justice today what horizontal subsidiarity is to power distribution in the function of sustainable economic growth.