Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-30-Speech-4-108"
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"en.20001130.2.4-108"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, we deplored the Brok report and the report by Mrs Lalumière, not only because of what they contain but also because of their subject matter, the common foreign and security policy. We have always believed it was unrealistic, and it has proved to be so in the eight years since it was adopted by the Maastricht Treaty.
Ironically, and just for the record, I should mention Article J2, the third paragraph of Title 5 of the Maastricht Treaty, which states: “Member States shall ensure that their national policies conform on the common positions”. This article has not been respected once; nor indeed have the other articles in Title 5. On the contrary, it has been consistently flouted, the last example to date being London’s recognition of North Korea. The President-in-Office of the European Union deplored this breach, which, and I quote him, he described as “exceptional”, and then, three days later Berlin followed suit without even taking the trouble, it seems, to inform the French Presidency.
We are a laughing stock and, basically, that is just one more disappointment for the poor old construction of Europe or, rather, the deconstruction of Europe. I am thinking, for example, of the reform of our institutions, which was promised for 1995, then 1997, and which still seems to be in the doldrums just a few days away from the Nice Summit. This will be just one more disappointment to add to our vagaries on enlargement, which itself has been promised for ten years, to say nothing of the successive and, I might add, cumulative collapses of the euro. But these are just examples. I could go on and talk about the reduction in appropriations for the MEDA programme or the European Development Fund.
There is just one thing to be retained from these reports and, if only for that, we would have to oppose it. That is the almost ritual reference to NATO since, basically, the only thing that Mr Brok has managed to put in the 1999 annual report is the Kosovo affair. It has to be said that, this time, the Europeans have found an arbiter in Washington and that, thanks to the rearguard of American generals, Europe has finally found a certain unity. This is laughable, I repeat, and when historians write the history of Europe in the twentieth century, I think they will mention neither the common foreign and security policy nor the League of Nations, and perhaps that is just as well."@en1
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