Strasbourg, February 12 - Premier Giuseppe Conte told the European Parliament Tuesday that Europe had not yet been able to build a European people and that European politics lost touch with people after the economic crisis of 2007-8. He added that a single EU seat at the United Nations Security Council was needed. Conte told the Strasbourg parliament that the construction of a 'European people' has seen "significant moments of advancement" but "we still haven't succeeded in really becoming a 'people', we haven't had the courage to build an inclusive model that, realistically, beyond all rhetoric, could favour the creation of a European demos." "European politics, faced with an unprecedented economic crisis, withdrew in fear inside the cold grammar of procedures, ending up by progressively losing contact with its people and making ever more unbridgeable the distance, which is not only geographical, between Brussels and the continent's many peripheries," the Italian premier said. "Politics gave up its legitimating and representative function, appearing - in the eyes of citizens - distant and 'oligarchic'." Conte added that "no European Member State can play a significant role on its own. "Hence the hope that a united European voice may find space also at the UN Security Council. "It is a battle, this one, on which the European Union must move in a coordinated way, it must speak with a single voice. "The European Union must be able to speak to the world. A strong, ambitious and coherent Europe is above all necessary to improve its capacity of talking to the United States".