Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-01-Speech-3-080"
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"I am very grateful to have this opportunity of contributing to the debate on the statement made by the High Representative. I will not detain the Parliament for long but perhaps I could make one or two points and begin, which is sometimes rather dangerous in any Parliament, by drawing attention to the relationship between rhetoric and reality. Mrs Pack did that in her remarks and anywhere that she is prepared to blaze a trail I think the rest of us should be courageous enough to follow.
But perhaps I could just say one or two things this afternoon. I think there is an umbilical cord between neglecting human rights, between neglecting habeas corpus, between neglecting all the usual rules of good governance, between tyranny and between environmental degradation. All those things come together. We talk about the complexities of our eco-system but there is an eco-system of values and political institutions which is just as important and absolutely crucial if we are going to make life better for people in countries like Mozambique and make life better for people rather closer to home in the Balkans as well.
So, in the coming months, we will be producing communications from the Commission, for example, which have a direct bearing on the whole question of preventing conflict or managing crises. We will be producing a communication shortly on an issue which this Parliament feels passionately about, that is, how we can ensure that election observation is conducted as comprehensively and sensibly as possible without diminishing the integrity of the institutions which do it.
We will be producing a communication on anti-personnel landmines, actually the use of sensor equipment. The work that has been done in dealing with landmines has been a success story in Mozambique. They have managed to clear tracks from the villages to the wells, they have managed to clear tracks from villages to the primary schools. What does one suppose has been the consequence of all that flooding over the last few days, moving those anti-personnel mines around? We are again going to have to go through the same sort of exercise.
What we have to be looking at is the way an issue like that connects with our policies elsewhere. We have to be looking at what we do with the stocks of anti-personnel landmines in Ukraine, in Moldova, the ecological consequences of dealing with those stocks, the financial consequences of dealing with those stocks, the political consequences of dealing with those stocks.
So the point I want to make is that all these things are intimately related. We have all the instruments, we have all the instruments that we require but we have to pull them together much more effectively than we have in the past and that is the challenge which the High Representative and I face in the next four or five years.
Now, I hope that in facing those challenges we will have support which consists of adequate resources as well as spectacular rhetoric. We all know that there are a number of reasons for the development of a common foreign and security policy and I will tell you three of them – Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo.
Those are three reasons for a common foreign and security policy and we will be tested on how successful a common foreign and security policy we develop above all by how we handle things in the Balkans and do not lose sight of the fact that there are quite a few of our critics, quite a few American politicians, quite a few senators and congressmen who say ‘How can we possibly take you seriously in developing a common foreign and security policy when you cannot even handle problems on your own back doorstep?’. So the big test for us is going to be in the Balkans. I hope that all those heads of government, all those prominent politicians in our Member States who promised the earth in the Balkans, who promised Marshall plans and who make all the other promises in the Balkans will be around when the budgetary authority decides how much we have got to spend in the Balkans.
I would very much hope that we can all live on a planet which is also inhabited by the European Council, the General Affairs Council and Ecofin. All on the same political planet together and making sure that there is some harmony between what we promised the world and what we can actually deliver.
In the last few months in this job I have heard promises that we will do more in Latin America, I have heard promises that if there is a Middle East peace settlement, we will be there to pay for it. I have heard promises that we will establish a stability pact in the southern Caucuses. I have heard promises that we will secure democracy in Indonesia by giving more assistance to Indonesia
Where is the beef? And that is not a contribution to any recent political controversy. That is the question that we have to address again and again in the coming weeks and months in my view. One reason why I am so passionately keen on carrying through an effective reform of our external assistance programmes is that I do not want to continue to be put in the situation where whenever one puts a question like that about the gulf between rhetoric and reality, the response is ‘Oh but we know you are not running things efficiently, we know that you have not spent all your commitments, we know there is some money in your back pocket’. I want us to be in a position in which we can say: ‘It is not like that any more. We are running things as efficiently and competently as we can’. So, Member States, we think that it is time that common foreign and security policy had a bridge between Council conclusions, between yards of communiqués and what we can actually deliver on the ground and I think that if we can achieve that the job of the High Representative will have been made a lot easier and the conditions of life for an awful lot of people around the world will have been made a lot better.
I would just like to say a word or two myself on that particular subject. I spoke last week at the extremely interesting session that was organised between members of the NATO parliamentary assembly and Members of this Parliament. Many of you were there on that occasion and I think that it is fair to say that you could have cut the scepticism with a knife among many of the NATO parliamentary delegates when we spoke about Europe’s ambitions in the area of CFSP. This was particularly true with some of the American delegates who were there but one or two of the others as well.
As I said in my remarks, I felt when I was speaking to some of them that they did not know whether to laugh or to cry and it is a reminder to all of us of the tests we have set ourselves and the tests which it is imperative that we meet over the coming months and years and in that context the High Representative’s remarks today were extremely encouraging.
We have come a remarkably long way in a remarkably short time, but there is still a very considerable distance to travel and over the next few months and years we are going to find ourselves, for example, facing up to difficult questions about resources. Many people will argue that of course all that is required in Europe is for us to make better use of our existing resources but I suspect there will be a growing debate in our own countries in the Member States about whether that really is enough, about whether that is going to secure the sort of security policy which we wish to be more responsible for in our own Union.
I would just like to say a word about the non-military aspects of our security policy, of conflict prevention and crisis management. Rightly, the concentration today has been on the military side but we have not forgotten about the non-military side either and Mozambique reminds us of the importance of remembering that. We will be bringing forward to the Council before Lisbon our proposals on a rapid reaction facility so that we can provide assistance where it is required, not in months or years, but in days or weeks.
We are establishing a Commission crisis centre as the operational interface with the situation centre in the high representative’s policy unit. Additionally, and this is for me the most important area of all, an area where we are breaking new ground, we will, soon after we have put forward our proposals on a rapid reaction facility, be bringing forward proposals as well on non-military headline goals.
It is, I repeat, breaking new ground but it is very important that we do it for a number of reasons and policing in Kosovo, policing elsewhere, is the most dramatic and obvious example. It is not just the sort of policing that we identify with community policemen on the street corner. I grew up as a kid hoping I would be allowed to stay up on Saturday evenings in order to see a television programme about a community policeman called Dixon of Dock Green. I have just been writing a report before I came to this job, and writing a very good report, just to respond to my honourable friend, on policing in part of my own country.
I remember talking about community policing to some American police experts and saying ‘What in your view is the ideal community police officer’ and the reply was ‘a black grandmother’. But that sort of approach to policing alas is not what is required in Kosovo. We have armed forces, we have all got experience of training community police officers. What is actually needed in those circumstances is something between the armed forces and community policing. We need somebody who has the ability to detect crime but who also has an enhanced ability to deal with really difficult public order situations as well. That is the sort of thing that we have to develop in the European Union and we have to face up to the fact that there are resource consequences. So again, rhetoric and reality.
Now Mr Titley referred to conflict prevention in the broadest sense and asked what intellectual contribution we were going to make to this debate. One thing I would advise him to do is to listen to Radio 4 at the end of March to the first Reith lecture where he will hear the Commissioner for External Relations giving an extremely moving and convincing lecture on this whole subject."@en1
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