Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-17-Speech-3-061"
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"en.20010117.2.3-061"2
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". – Mr President, I am delighted to be able to respond to the excellent report by Mr Newton Dunn, on the rapid reaction facility. He is a friend and colleague. We used to be, indeed, fellow tribesmen before he wandered, I hope temporarily, off the reservation, but I am not at all surprised, knowing the author, that this is such an excellent report.
Just before coming specifically to the amendments let me respond to one or two points in the debate.
Both Mr Newton Dunn and Mr Wiersma – who spoke shortly after him – suggested that I should give examples of when the rapid reaction mechanism would be useful. Almost the first problem I had to deal with when I became a Commissioner was how to deliver oil rapidly to the democratically controlled municipalities in Serbia. Frankly, it strained our administrative creativity to get that done. We have actually managed to do it in a way which I believe satisfied the Court of Auditors as well as getting assistance into those municipalities very rapidly. The only other country, the only other donor which actually got involved as well, because of the complexities of what we were taking on, was Norway to which I pay particularly warm tribute, but it was a difficult job, it would have been easier if we had had this mechanism in place in order to do it.
I was asked about conflict prevention and I very much agree with what the honourable gentleman, my honourable friend I might say even though we are not members of the same party, Mr Hume, had to say about this, who knows more about conflict prevention than most of the rest of us put together. The important thing about conflict prevention is that it should be quick and effective, and I repeat the word "quick".
Now, Mr Howitt challenged me to say whether I believed that development assistance is the best form of conflict prevention. Of course I do. Sensibly used development assistance along with a generous and sensible attitude to the trading relations between countries is by far the most effective way of trying to cope with conflicts, a point made admirably the other day in an excellent article in
by Martin Wolf bringing together the findings of a number of academic studies on conflicts in Africa and in other societies. So of course I agree with that, but the Commission will actually be bringing forward in the next month or two a communication on conflict prevention in which we will try to pull together some of the imaginative ideas which are being developed both in the Commission and elsewhere for conflict prevention which is increasingly, as we have to cope with the dark side of globalisation, the major subject on the agenda of Foreign and Security Ministers.
But in providing the assistance, in providing the resources to deal with conflict prevention, I just want to make one point. It is not a question of the Commission raiding one budget in order to find money elsewhere. The Commission only has the money which the budgetary authority provides, which the Council and which Parliament provides, and my view, which I will be rehearsing once again in the General Affairs Council next Monday, is the Commission for too long has allowed others to get away without setting priorities and has been landed with all the political odium of setting priorities itself. I think we need to engage Parliament and Ministers much more in discussing the relationship between our political and development priorities and our external spending around the world, because if we only have a limited amount of money to spend, as we will have for the foreseeable future, for ever as long as there is a finance minister, we will always have to make very difficult choices between priorities, and not everybody will like what those choices are. But I agree with what the honourable Member said about development assistance and with his view that it should be primarily directed towards the alleviation of poverty.
Let me deal with the amendments proposed by Parliament. Of the 38 put forward, the Commission can take on board 34, either as they are or with small drafting changes. That is a measure of how close we are on this issue.
We have difficulty with four amendments. Firstly, Amendment No 9: the first part talks about the need for the rapid reaction facility to be supported by the setting up of civil headline goals. We are happy with that notion, but we cannot go along with the European Public Security Force suggested in the second part of the amendment, which is plainly well beyond the Commission's remit. I hope my honourable friend, Mr Van Orden, took note of that and that I can at least dismiss that nightmare.
Amendment No 14 adds a new recital on the financial rationale behind the budget line created for the mechanism and its budget provision. This amendment seems to stem from an earlier misunderstanding of the whole mechanism which later discussions in the European Parliament have cleared up. It is now very clear that there is no question of moving activities or budget out of CFSP or to hijacking options under that pillar into a Community framework. The mechanism is wholly a Community instrument, and so is the origin of its budget.
We cannot accept Amendment No 28, because the "Community" is not the Budgetary Authority. Only the Budgetary Authority is entitled to determine annual financial provisions in the budget.
Finally, the Commission would not of itself have been against Amendment No 29, but we have in a spirit of compromise accepted the demand put forward by the Council to limit the duration of operations, given the considerable flexibility achieved in other respects.
The rapid reaction facility, as it is called in the report, is of course now called the rapid reaction mechanism to avoid any possible confusion with the rapid reaction force over which, let me repeat for the benefit of readers of parts of the press from the country I know best, I have no responsibility whatsoever. That is a negative "no" rather than an affirmative "no", just for the benefit of the correspondence columns of
.
These are not, I am sure as honourable Members will appreciate, exactly fundamental differences. That is because basically we share the same objectives: to improve our performance considerably, to improve our response in crises. That is, I repeat, what this mechanism is all about. I very much welcome the support which overwhelmingly most honourable Members have given it thus far. I hope very much that honourable Members will give it a fair wind this week because, like you, I want to have it operational as quickly as possible.
This is all about the credibility and the effectiveness of the European Union around the world. If honourable Members do not support this, I repeat, God knows what they think the European Union is for.
I have to say I did listen to the speech by my friend, Mr Van Orden. I thought that it was a good example of dancing on pinheads. I must say that his principal objection concerned what I think is Amendment No 9 and, as I shall say shortly we are opposed to Amendment No 9. But, if there is some confusion about the nature of what we are attempting to do, I have to say that it is partly because of what some of those who agree with the honourable gentleman have been saying about these proposals.
If Conservatives like my honourable friend do not approve of this, I have to ask the question, not entirely rhetorically, what the hell will they ever approve of? In the days when I was chairman of the party of which the honourable gentlemen is a member, we actually believed in trying to speed up the delivery of financial assistance. We actually believed in trying to cut through red tape. So, I wonder what the hell my honourable friend and his colleagues actually believe in these days. I think it would be desirable to look beyond those correspondence columns of
for one's information on an important subject like this.
Now, I am responsible for ensuring that the Commission is able to respond swiftly and effectively in a crisis both on its own and, as is perhaps more likely to be the case, as part of an overall European Union response to crises including those in which the European Union rapid reaction force might find itself deployed. The lesson of recent years has been very clear. Responding to crises very often involves the deployment of a wide array of tools, sometimes encompassing the military, frequently including policies and programmes for which the Commission has a responsibility or involvement from trade policy to humanitarian aid, from the provision of election monitors to assistance on the ground with customs missions, border management, assistance to the independent media and so on.
Too often in the past, take the Balkans for example, we have just not been able to respond with the efficiency or timeliness that developments in the real world demand. Or, we have had to wade through procedural treacle in Brussels which has bogged down officials who should have been devoting every effort to getting the job done in the field. That, I fear, was my impression when I came into this job. We are trying to rectify these deficiencies. Weakness is exposed by real events, not theoretical models.
I have devoted a great deal of my attention since I became a Commissioner to trying to improve that delivery on the ground. I think we have started to make progress, as I believe our response to recent events in Serbia has demonstrated. There the Commission was in the all too unusual position of being praised by the local government and by other donors for the rapidity with which we were able to deliver. But this is still too rare, and getting help where it is needed fast still requires a great deal of effort on the part of our officials to cut their way through bureaucratic thickets.
We owe it to them and to those we are trying to help to equip them properly to do the job. That is what this proposal for a rapid reaction mechanism is all about. Just as the wider reforms which we are introducing to our external assistance programmes across the world are designed to ensure that the European Union aid programme begins to earn and to deserve a reputation for excellence. The rapid reaction mechanism will allow us to activate very rapidly and to disburse quickly Community funds in response to crises or emerging crises. The draft regulation under discussion in the Council reflects the amendments submitted by Parliament. We want to ensure maximum flexibility both geographically and bureaucratically, dispensing with complex comitology rules, for example, in favour of straight provision of information to the Council and the European Parliament and simplifying as much as possible the decision-making process.
The aim will be for the rapid reaction mechanism to be activated to cope with the initial limited period of a crisis, pending the coming on stream of the regular Community programme, be it CARDS or TACIS, or whatever. Interventions under the mechanism will be limited in time and amount up to EUR 12 m each time."@en1
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"The Daily Telegraph"1
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