Miroslav Lajcak Quotes

For Europe to play a part in the world on the scale of its wealth and its population and its capacities, Europe has to be united in some way, and Europe is not united.

The Netherlands believes in a vigorous Europe with a commission that is independent and robust.

Effectively, the EU is a very powerful bureaucracy, dominated now by the German elite, which is backed by the rest of the European Union members.

The Europe we are in the process of building is the Europe of the 21st century; it's not the Europe of the 20th century.

I was a Member of the European Parliament for a period of time and I saw a lot of European laws and treaties.

As Tony Blair has made clear, our fundamental challenge is how to make Europe work better.

For many people, politics in Brussels and Strasbourg might as well be happening on another planet.

I am a very committed European.

We must build a kind of United States of Europe.

Moscow would have to give up its its global aspirations and agree to obey rules that it had played no part in devising. European Commission President Romano Prodi expressed this formula best in 2002: Russia would share with the EU wvweything but institutions..... this meant Russia would adopt EU rules and regulations but would not be able to influence their development.

I believe many people - especially small- and medium-sized enterprises across the European Union - are disenchanted with Europe because we haven't delivered the goods.

The European Union, ok, right, it has a bureaucracy, right. It's sometimes difficult to deal with but so what? You hire a couple of people like me to work the European Union, and it can be done. It's pretty good.

The European Union Treaty... within a few years will lead to the creation of what the founding fathers of modern Europe dreamed of after the war, the United States of Europe.

There is a distorted perception of what goes on in Brussels. No one reports on the Commission taking a hundred initiatives from its predecessor off the table in order to shift competencies back to member state governments.

It is national parliaments, which are, and will remain, the true source of real democratic legitimacy and accountability in the EU.

After 30 years in Brussels, I can tell you: The relationship between the Commission and the Parliament has probably never been as good as it is now.

The European Union is not only a great idea, but it's also an idea we must keep working on.

Europe is a community of half a billion people, more than Russia and the United States combined.

The obstacle for us is not Islam, but the bureaucrats in Brussels.

The European Union is here to stay.

Now people are criticizing Europe, the European Commission, Juncker and the whole lot because the distribution of refugees didn't succeed immediately. But you also have to recognize that close to 20,000 refugees have already been redistributed. There are only a few member states that do not want to take part.

You can't deepen the European Union against the wishes of the European countries.

The EU must be able to act with the speed and flexibility of a network, not the cumbersome rigidity of a bloc.

We know that the abilities of European Union member states are not infinite. As such, it makes little sense for us to criticize each other.All of us accepted Sweden's decision to introduce border controls too. And that is a country that was for decades the most open to immigration.

We need to move forward, from the common currency to the banking union to a common financial policy and, in the middle-term, to a common foreign and security policy. That will take time, because we need to figure out how to deal with those countries that don't always want a more tightly integrated European Union.