Italy Agrees With Germany on European Federation ProposalItalian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini said Saturday that he agreed with the idea put forward Friday by his German counterpart Joschka Fischer, who proposed an unspecified European nucleus to cope with European Union reform and expansion and map out a true European federation."This is a line of thought which, from many angles, I myself developed in the meeting of foreign ministers in the Azores a few days ago," Dini said, referring to the informal consultations held on May 5 and 6 in San Miguel, the Azores. Hopefully the new idea will pave the way for the on-going negotiations to beef up European institutions and their work, as well as in the perspective of its expansion, Italian news agency Ansa quoted Dini as saying. Facing these challenges, Dini said that "the European Union must be capable of speaking in a single voice and must thus achieve a more precise identity which will allow our continent to act as a protagonist on the international scene, and not as a spectator." The Italian minister went on to say that, within a shared framework, it will be necessary for "the member states that want and can do so to go ahead of the others without delay toward the goal of political integration." "This is the crucial knot the intergovernmental conference on the revision of the treaties must untie within the year to thereby provide concrete prospects for progress toward a strong and dynamic European project," said Dini. On Friday, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said in Berlin that he envisioned a "center of gravity" or "locomotive" in the "avant-garde" for integrating policy ahead of the creation of a European federation. However, he said that he could not instantly answer the questions as to which states to be included in that project, and whether the EU founders, the 11 members of the euro or yet another group could serve as the "locomotive". At the same time, he recalled that the same idea had been put forward by former European Commission President Jacques Delors, who spoke of basing a federation initiative on the six founders of the European Community, and discussed by ex-German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who named the euro 11 as a core for these efforts. |
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