This Europe needs a vision, it needs powers to think and to produce a new development model, and it needs new solutions to economic issues: how can we achieve more industrial and budgetary integration; how can we prioritise the long term over the short term; how can we ensure, for example, that the banks are there, firstly, to support businesses, households and European investors in the area of regulation; how can we put in place a European regulator who can discuss social issues on an equal footing with his or her US counterpart; how can we implement a pact on employment; how can we achieve more upwards harmonisation in the monetar ...[+++]y field; how can we use and demonstrate solidarity; how can we achieve, in the future perhaps, a further enlargement of the euro area, including in the area of sustainable development; and how can we make this transition work, not only in Europe but also in developing countries?

As Mr Bolkestein has pointed out, the European Patent Office has allowed itself to take this dangerous route to a certain extent, as Japanese jurisprudence has also done, for example.

Finally, having read through the additional amendments, many of which have been retabled predominantly by the Committee on the Environment, I found it somewhat disappointing that those Members found it necessary to go along that path.

In the second place, you also mentioned safeguarding the European social model, reiterating the conclusions of the Lisbon Summit – which we feel are a move in the right direction, the direction of defending the trio of ‘employment, social cohesion and competitivity’. I shall take the liberty, Mr President, of adding two further fundamental questions to this agenda.

It is clear from the conclusions of the European Council of Tampere that Eurojust should mark a further qualitative step in closer judicial co-operation and go beyond the current and potential work of the European Judicial Network.

New Commission proposals which further develop the approach outlined in the communication on voluntary organizations and foundations, on which Mrs Ghilardotti recently drew up a report on behalf of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, are required in order to break through the impasse as regards EU legislative activity in the social economy sector.