Brussels, 07/06/2001 (Agence Europe) - Speaking in Brussels on Wednesday at a special session of the European Liberal democrats (chaired by Werner Hoyer) in the European Parliament, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Party, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said that an EU that lays down the foundations of a Economic and Monetary Union "deserves a just as common social and political Union", and that an EU with a single currency must not fear building a common European defence. This is no plea for a "European super-State", but for a "federal Europe seeking a new balance between the EU, the Member States and the constitutional regions", Verhoftadt made a point of stating, using, to define "subsidiarity", the words the "right federal logic". With the Laeken Declaration which should end the Belgian Presidency, we want to provide the EU with "a vision, an agenda, a method and a timetable enabling it to act on this vision over the next ten years", said Mr. Verhoftadt, for whom the Laeken Declaration must mark the beginning of a "wide-ranging political debate and one on society as such", with the active participation not only of governments but also the EP and the Commission, "possibly through a Convention,…. possibly".
Verhofstadt was thus responding to EP President Nicole Fontaine, who said she had the feeling that he was in favour of the convening of a convention and who, moreover, had stressed the "increasingly essential role" the Liberal Group played in the European Parliament. The former leaders of the Party, Willy De Clercq (who is now honourary President) and Colette Flesch recalled that it was especially on the initiative of Gaston Thorn and Hans-Dietrich Genscher that the party had seen the light of day, in Stuttgart in March 1976. Pat Cox, President of the Liberal Group in the EP said that the European Liberals were a "coalition of conviction, and not merely of interests", and, at the very moment general elections were being held in his country, British Liberal-Democrat Graham Watson, Chair of the EP's Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, stated that his party would, in Westminster, do all it could to "bring Britain fully into the family of European nations".