Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-12-Speech-3-187"
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"en.20000412.6.3-187"2
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"Mr President, I arrived in the Chamber this afternoon with an extremely good speech, which I would like to thank my cabinet for most warmly; but perhaps I can deliver it on another occasion because I would actually like to respond informally to this debate.
The winter is over, so there is not the same urgent necessity for oil at the moment. We are looking at ways to extend that sort of scheme. What we have been thinking of, among other ideas, is education for democracy: providing schools with equipment, school-books and other facilities, cash to carry out small improvements to classrooms and so on, and with sports equipment – all those sorts of things which can make for a better life for the kids in those towns while they have to wait with their families for the departure – sooner rather than later, I hope – of Mr Milosevic.
I hope we are at last going to see more progress on the cleaning up of the Danube, which is crucial for the region. We had useful meetings with the Danube Commission last week and I hope that the annual meeting of the Danube Commission this week will see us managing to set all that in motion, with the European Union meeting about 85% of the cost of the clean-up.
I have spoken before of my concerns about Montenegro. Following my visit there about a month ago, we have doubled our Obnova support for Montenegro from EUR 10 to 20m. We are also providing a good deal there in terms of food security and so on. I very much hope that the European Investment Bank will lend some money within reasonable limits to Montenegro before too long.
Finally, the honourable Member asked about the scale of our financial commitments to the Balkans. There will be other occasions when I can follow this up in greater detail. For me one of the real tests is whether all those yards of Council communiqués and all those promises about Marshall plans and so on for the Balkans actually amount to a row of beans! This year we will be spending about EUR 540m in the western Balkans. Because of the front-loading of our commitments in Kosovo, next year we will need to spend about EUR 800m in the Balkans. About EUR 350m of that will go to Kosovo.
It must be said that it does not involve huge increases in expenditure elsewhere but we have to provide support in a country like Croatia where there is a good and decent government trying to do a difficult job in extremely problematic circumstances. We have to spend money with those stabilisation and association countries which are negotiating seriously with us on the road to Europe.
For me, in public-spending terms, the crucial year is always year one – you are lucky if you get to year two or three. Year one is actually the big year of expenditure for us.
Overall, at Istanbul, when we were asked how much we thought we could spend in the region, recognising that it was subject to the budgetary authority – I know all the theology of these matters now – we reckoned about EUR 5.5bn. People say that is a crazy figure. Well, I am keen that we should no longer be in the position we are in now where, despite the interinstitutional agreement, we are told by a lot of people that we have to find the extra money for Kosovo within the financial envelope agreed before Kosovo became a necessity.
One thing I have insisted on is a realistic figure in our budgeting for reconstruction in Serbia, because I do not want to find myself in two or three years time having to find additional costs for Serbia out of that same budget. We reckon that applying the same sort of figures applied in Kosovo, we would need about EUR 2.3bn for a serious reconstruction programme in Serbia. That could only start once Milosevic has gone. However, in my view it would be thoroughly irresponsible for us to suggest figures to this Parliament or Council which did not include an element of what we think would be realistic for Serbia. That is based on economists’ figures and our assessment that we need to meet the same sort of a proportion of expenditure on Serbia that we have met in Kosovo.
The rest – EUR 3.2bn – over seven years does not strike me as being outlandishly generous. That is how we reached the figure of EUR 5.5bn and I have slightly resented the implication in some newspapers that this is a figure we have plucked out of the air and does not make any sense. I should be delighted to explain it not just in more detail to Parliament but I am looking forward in due course to explaining it in more detail to the General Affairs Council. Who knows, if I was lucky enough one day, I might even be able to explain it to finance ministers.
I respond to the honourable Member’s well-intentioned question in that way. This is not a figure plucked out of the air: it is an attempt to provide an honest assessment of what our rhetoric actually means. People cannot resent the fact that they do it: they asked us to do it in relation to the Middle East – to give some idea of what the cost of a peace settlement would be for the European Union’s programmes. So let us see the cost of it in the Balkans. If we are going to have an argument about the relationship between rhetoric and reality, let us start here.
Members of the House will have noticed that the High Representative and I produced a report for the Lisbon Council, and I suspect that Mr Lagendijk might have noticed that it bore a striking similarity to his own report. I am not sure which was chicken and egg, but I feel that in complimenting Mr Lagendijk on the report he will not take it amiss and think that I am really congratulating Mr Solana and myself. Yet there was a great deal of similarity. It is fair to say that our work for the Lisbon Council was very much motivated by the strong feeling that unless we can make a success of our efforts in the Balkans, the whole credibility of our attempts to construct a common foreign and security policy will be shattered. It is enormously important that we rise to the challenge in the Balkans.
My final point: we are clearly talking in the Balkans about building peace and security, not just in our backyard but in our front yard too. We are talking about building peace and security in an integral part of our European common home. I hope we can do so in practice with the rhetoric, with the promises, with the optimism that we show in all those rhetorical communiqués.
A point we made to the heads of government in Lisbon in our report – which was very much reflected in the week that I spent recently in the region – is that the stabilisation and association process has to be at the heart of our strategy. To put it in a rather more demotic way, in the phrase used by my honourable friend Ms Pack, what it means is designing, helping countries along the road to Europe. They want to be integrated with the Euro-Atlantic structures; they want that as an alternative to the traumatic disintegration of the last few years. We have to make that a real process for them.
There were a lot of references to the Stability Pact conference the other day, which as several people have said was a considerable success. The offers made by donors exceeded by a comfortable margin the expectations at the beginning of the conference.
There are a couple of points I want to make about it. One, in response to Mr Lagendijk, it is true that some of the money going into the quick-start projects supported by the European Union was money from the 1998 and 1999 budgets. There is a simple reason for that, which is that in some cases we had already carried out feasibility studies and made preparations for these quick-start projects. In my book, new money is money you have not spent already. Unfortunately, given the fact that our budget is based on commitments and payments, and not just payments unlike the budgets in almost all the Member States, that is a particularly important factor. Committing money does not always mean spending it, the next year or the year after or even in the next decade. It is important to be clear about that.
This follows up the point made by Mr Swoboda and it is a point with which I strongly agree. We are not just talking about infrastructure in terms of hardware, we must also talk about infrastructure in terms of software. That includes the rule of law, democratisation, the sort of civil society projects to which the honourable gentleman was referring; and it includes education – a point I will come back to in a moment.
I want to make one or two other points which arose at Lisbon and which we are following up. First of all, we were charged in the Commission at Lisbon to bring forward a package of proposals on asymmetric trade concessions for the region. It is worth remembering that the total exports from the Balkans to the European Union represent about 0.6% of our total imports. For agricultural products the figure is about 0.16%. So this is an area where we could afford to be a little generous.
We are also trying speed up our assistance and make it more effective. I announced yesterday agreement in the Commission on a rapid reaction facility. We will be coming forward to Parliament in the next few months with our new regulation for assistance to the West Balkans, which I hope will make it more rapid, more flexible and will, of course, have to include sufficient funding for projects supporting gender issues. I can think of no single model of successful economic or political development which does not include at its heart sensible programmes to ensure that women can develop their full potential and play a full role in their communities.
One point on education: last winter, despite all the cynicism, our energy for democracy programme in Serbia was extraordinarily successful. Alas, there are not many occasions when people cheer the European Union in the streets – all too few occasions in the country I know best. But that happened in some of those cities last winter. The Mayor of Nis has just written a letter saying that Energy for Democracy was a model of the sort of political support we should be providing in his country."@en1
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