Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-06-Speech-3-126"
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"en.20000906.5.3-126"2
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"Europe is going to expand eastwards. This is written in Agenda 2000. But Europe has a fluid border to the south, conditioned by its geography.
Boats and rafts arrive along its borders in southern Italy and southern Spain. They are loaded and sometimes overloaded with Albanians, Turks, Muslims – men, women and children from all the countries around the Mediterranean. It is a tidal wave that is going to grow year by year. Europe is going to be submerged, even though at El Elejido in 1999 and in just a few other places, the settled populations have reacted against this flood of nomads.
Not wanting any roll back and unable to achieve containment, European leaders are logically seeking to prevent these nomads from leaving their home countries. And this is the aim of the common-sense MEDA programme.
Sketched out at the European Summit in Cannes in June 1995, established by the Barcelona Conference of November 1995 in the form of a Euro-Mediterranean partnership, and implemented by the MEDA Regulation of 23 July 1996, this Mediterranean policy of the European Union is based on a few regional and national investment projects. It is a meagre amount: EUR 3.3 billion from 1995 to 1999, from Morocco to Gaza and the West Bank, even if, by adding to it the EUR 3.6 million in loans from the European Investment Bank, the financial contribution is greater than the EUR 4.4 billion given by the World Bank.
It is a meagre amount, not only because, in reality, these EUR 3.6 billion in commitment loans are in fact reduced to a collective payment of just EUR 648 million, but also because this step is not commensurate with the size of the problem.
Admittedly, it is good to have moved from bilateral aid to a global, multilateral approach. Admittedly, for 2000-2006, MEDA II will increase loans of less than 47.1% to arrive at a financial package of EUR 8.5 billion. European farmers would be happy with an increase that was twice, three times less than that.
But that does not constitute a Mediterranean policy. A Mediterranean policy is not more programmes and more officials in Brussels to manage them. A Mediterranean policy that is up to the demographic, environmental, climatic, Islamic and cultural challenge is a grand strategic vision, establishing, integrating, stabilising and organising the Mediterranean around original and intergovernmental institutions with major common sectors to explore: water, the environment, migration, deforestation and so on.
Under these conditions, and with a method and integrated institutions such as a High Secretariat for the Mediterranean, one can talk of a budget, as there will be strategic projects and not tactical sprinklings of small amounts. But we must act quickly, very quickly, before a colonised Europe has nothing more to share than the decline of peoples who have been deprived of their culture."@en1
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