Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-13-Speech-3-153"
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"en.20001213.6.3-153"2
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". – Mr President, I am pleased to have this opportunity to update Parliament on preparations for the EU/US Summit in Washington next Monday. Good relations between the United States and the European Union are, of course, vital for world security and for global economic prosperity. The better the relationship, the safer the world and the better off our people.
Today that relationship is in generally good shape. Europe and the United States work closely together in defence of the values we share. We work together, for example, for a liberal, dependable international trading regime under the WTO. We stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of democracy and freedom across the world.
As in any relationship between friends it is natural that there are occasional disputes, but we should not get these out of proportion. On the whole, we have managed recent disputes competently, for example, on the trade side. It is important to remember that they represent just a fraction of the total trade that crosses the Atlantic. The EU/US Consultative Forum on Biotechnology is an example of how to deal with these issues constructively. It will be reporting to this summit on a broad range of biotech issues.
This will be President Clinton's fifteenth and last EU/US Summit. It will give us an opportunity to look again at the new transatlantic agenda and to see how we might streamline procedures and focus future summits more precisely on the really big issues. We would like to focus the twice-yearly summits on strategic themes that may run across several summits. This is, I acknowledge, easier said than done, but we should try to resist the temptation – and I know that Secretary of State Albright shares this view – for these summits to get excessively entangled in the nitty-gritty of our daily political and economic relationships.
The Commission is currently producing a draft communication on transatlantic relations which we expect to publish in the spring and we will look forward, for example, to the contribution made by those legislators who are part of our transatlantic relationship and Parliament will, I know, want to be involved in this initiative. We have made some progress in moving things in the direction I describe in recent summits and I hope we will be able to take this forward in Washington next week. We will, for example, be following up the discussion we launched at Cotonou on Africa and communicable diseases. There are some differences in our approach to these matters, but I hope that the summit will send a positive message about the need to pursue our efforts together notably in tackling sensitive questions such as access to affordable drugs including tiered pricing.
We will cover outstanding trade disputes and aim to lay the foundations for WTO compatible solutions that are mutually acceptable and not unilateral. We expect there to be discussion on a future new WTO round as well as some discussion of the implications for that round of the wide array of new bilateral trade initiatives being debated in the American hemisphere.
I am sure there will be discussion too of other areas where the United States and the European Union do not quite see eye-to-eye, for example, on the environment where we must make every effort to support work to salvage a deal on climate change. The summit will naturally touch on key areas where the European Union and the United States have worked and are working closely together in the service of peace, first, on the Balkans where we have had an increasingly close and successful relationship and where, partly thanks to our efforts, there have been so many important changes for the better over the last year. We shall, no doubt, review recent developments in the Middle East. The President and his administration have devoted enormous efforts to the pursuit of lasting peace in the Middle East. Today the dark shadow of violence hangs over the region, but the patient persistent efforts of the peacemakers must continue. The European Union has a role to play in the process and we are doing that. Plainly the consolidation of peace will be closely related to the development of our Mediterranean partnership.
Finally, we will, I am sure, touch on the recent decisions at Nice on the European rapid reaction force. These are important decisions. They represent an attempt by Europe to make good some of the failures revealed in the Balkans in the 1990s and most recently during the Kosovo conflict. One of the main lessons was that the Europeans needed to shoulder more of the burden in promoting European security. We need to do so, not to decouple the United States from the defence of Europe, not because we believe there is any weakening of the US strategic commitment to Europe, but to answer those in Washington who sometimes call it into question: the voices that claim, with some justification, that Europe cannot continue to depend on the United States to bail it out of European conflicts unless it is prepared to do more to help itself.
This then will be the last summit under this administration, the last such summit with President Clinton. Transatlantic relations will, I hope, grow ever stronger in the years to come, but Europe will miss President Clinton. He has been a good friend to this continent. He has laid the foundations for a serious and mature dialogue between us in the post-Cold-War world and he has worked tirelessly for a cause we all share, that of a Europe whole and free and increasingly prosperous. From Kosovo to Belfast, millions of European citizens have cause to be thankful for the contribution he has made and I know that the House will join with me in paying tribute to that contribution today."@en1
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