The Danish referendum result has made waves throughout Europe. It has shown that Europe can only be created if it exists not only on paper but if it is understood and above all is accepted by its citizens. Education is thus necessary. Politicians such as we who campaign for the further development of Europe must therefore seriously come to terms with the concerns of our populations and replace scattered opinions and unjustified assumptions with facts and figures. I am thinking in particular of my own country where politicians of different hues and even sections of the press exploit history's legacy of sensitivity to currency devaluation and monetary destabilisation to create anti-European feeling in the population. For that reason it is all the more important to explain to our population that Germany owes its very affluence, stability and newly gained unity in large measure to its belonging to an integrated Europe. We must convince our fellow citizens that Maastricht does not mean abandoning stable mone

tary and currency policy. In particular we must explain to them that there is no serious alternative to European integration.

Beyond that we must appeal to the fact that the Community was founded with the aim of offering all EC citizens the highest possible degree of prosperity, mobility and internal and external security.

In this respect we have not faired badly in the last few decades. The successes of the EC and its gravitational pull on other states speak for themselves. But we have not yet reached the ultimate goal. The embracing of a common foreign and security policy, the deepening of collaboration on interior affairs and justice, the entrenchment of the principle of subsidiarity, the strengthening of the powers of the European Parliament, the creation of Union citizenship as well as of active and positive electoral rights in the case of local and EP elections, to mention the most important, are necessary and important steps, but they are only first steps towards the realisation of a European Union which is inseparable from the creation of an economic and monetary union.

What we see in Maastricht is not the end but the beginning of a development. Not even Rome was built in a day. And the processs of European integration advances step by small step and through hard won compromises, not at breathtaking "TGV" speed. Indeed what we expect from the Revision Conference planned for 1996 is further progress.

Ulich Irmer (Member of the Bundestag)