Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-13-Speech-3-051"
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"Mr President, the Council Presidency started by making some general points on the state of transatlantic relations and spoke about our trade relations before concluding with the steel issue. I will take these points in reverse, not to contradict the Presidency – quite the opposite; I think that we are working very well together – but because inevitably the Commission is more preoccupied with recent events.
After all – and this is the most important thing – we need to protect our own market against the risk of a deflection of trade in steel products which, as I have said, will no longer be able to enter the United States.
We have initiated all of the procedures to this end and we are going to take measures which are commensurate with the risks posed by this influx of imports. For a number of weeks now, we have had an early warning system for imports in place. We are therefore ready. We had taken the necessary precautions. We will take these measures in full compliance with WTO rules. We will not close our market to steel imports. We simply wish to ensure that all of the steel products originally destined for the United States do not overflow onto the European market, and we will ensure that our own measures enter into force at the precise moment when the American measures closing their market take effect.
Why stick to the rules when, in this case, the Americans have clearly decided to disregard them? Because we do not consider the world market to be the Wild West, where anyone can act as they see fit. There are rules and regulations which here, as in other cases, guarantee the smooth functioning of the multilateral system, and we think, taking our lead from the Council and this House, that the medium and long-term interests of the Union are best served by ensuring the smooth functioning of a regulated multilateral system. In Europe we have a steel industry which is restructured, productive, strong and competitive. It is therefore in our interests to apply clear ground rules.
In summary, the Union is being hit by unjust and unfounded measures. The Commission, in close collaboration with all of the stakeholders – the Council, Parliament, the metallurgical industry and its unions – has decided to respond vigorously using all of the means at its disposal. We are going to protect our companies and our jobs from the potentially devastating indirect effects of these measures and we will continue to hammer home our argument that the American decision is bad for the American economy, bad for our steel industry and bad for world trade.
Recent events should not make us lose sight of the broader picture where our trade relations are concerned. Like the President-in-Office of the Council, I consider these to be generally of high quality and to represent the greatest volume of bilateral trade and investment in the world. These trade disputes which sometimes hit the headlines only concern, let us remember, a limited proportion of our trade. We also have a more positive agenda to manage with the United States, on both a multilateral and bilateral level.
I will pass quickly over the multilateral aspect. I believe that it was clearly demonstrated in Doha, as Mr Piqué has just said, that when the United States and the European Union work side by side on a number of issues, if not on all of them, they secure promising multilateral decisions, such as the launch of a new trade round as agreed in Doha.
Let us dwell more on the bilateral side. Of course we always have bilateral priorities for the Transatlantic Economic Partnership and we continue to support the idea that we need to work together on positive measures to boost bilateral trade. This is not always easy. We need to show tenacity and think in the medium and long term about mutual recognition, regulatory cooperation, food safety or data protection. In many cases we have achieved results, even if all of these subjects do not always capture the imagination of the press. We need to reflect on other initiatives which might have a little more political resonance or visibility, so as to breathe new life into a transatlantic agenda which some of you now consider to have become too much of a ritual, even sometimes to have run out of steam altogether. We are open to ideas and we have some of our own. We are working, for example, on negotiating a possible transatlantic agreement in the field of air transport – we are looking forward to the Court's ruling – on cooperating on intellectual property and on more extensive harmonisation of regulations on accounting, finance and insurance. In addition, with a view to the next transatlantic summit, we have started considering the advisability of taking initiatives in this field. Personally, I am in favour of such initiatives.
Nevertheless, we need to manage other conflicts where we are divided by matters other than steel, and there are a number of them. The issue of hormones in beef is not completely settled, even if promising negotiations have been started. The clementines matter has still not been resolved and neither have the dispute over duty-free American exports nor the case of foreign sales corporations, which is obviously significant. Our policy in these matters remains clear: we need to respect the international rules. This is true for us as it is for the Americans, and in the case of the tax-related subsidies for exports the United States has already undertaken to abide by the rules. We will use all of the means at our disposal to ensure that they do just that.
I will close by addressing the general state of transatlantic relations, which the Council Presidency has already commented on at length. I believe that 11 September had actually raised hopes that the United States' diplomacy and international attitude were going to become a little more multilateral. We are obliged, I believe, to conclude that this is not the case and that the few signs of unilateralism which we observed prior to 11 September – the agreement on the International Criminal Court, the ABM Treaty, Kyoto – have not gone away, indeed quite the contrary. The Commission considers that if, in the light of recent events, any changes are required, then they probably consist more than ever in the need to have strong multilateral institutions and greater implementation of international law.
This is the message which we try to get over to our American counterparts at our meetings. Together we need to consider the challenges, excesses, possibilities and risks presented by globalisation, and together we need to foster cooperation in an increasingly interdependent world. The next key date will be the transatlantic summit on 2 May. On this occasion we will spare no effort to try and relaunch a number of collaborative projects between the United States and Europe, on the fight against drugs, on judicial cooperation and, why not, on preparing for the Johannesburg Summit, when I believe that the world will need both the United States and Europe.
Let us start then with steel. As you all know, last week we witnessed the latest outbreak of steel protectionism, a chronic illness suffered by American trade policy which stands in total contradiction to the Bush administration's rhetoric in favour of free trade. Once again, the United States has on this occasion reinvented what we might call intermittent free trade: one day it works, the next day it does not. Well, on 6 March it was not working.
The measures announced by President Bush in relation to steel are clearly political. They have no legal or economic foundation, and we Europeans, who paid the socially and financially heavy price for restructuring in the Eighties and Nineties, know that it is necessary to adopt this course of action in order to adapt and become competitive. The United States has chosen the opposite approach: rather than tackling the problems at the heart of their steel industry – and these are considerable – they are forcing the outside world to bear the burden of the visible symptoms of these problems.
We know perfectly well that it is not acceptable to blame imports for all of the difficulties faced by the American steel industry, even if globally there is still surplus capacity.
In fact, these decisions are intended to transfer the burden of restructuring the American steel industry onto the rest of the world, and in particular onto us. We are probably the main victim of these measures, given our export flows and the quality of the products which we have been exporting to the United States. This is the first, direct consequence of the measures. In addition, we are threatened by a second consequence, which is indirect and probably on a considerably larger scale, since these measures threaten to divert a good proportion of the steel products which no longer have access to the American market onto the European market.
The Union is going to adopt all of the measures at its disposal in this field to protect both its industry and its jobs. Unlike the United States, we are quite simply going to abide strictly by the international commitments which we have signed up to.
We are of course going to bring the issue before the WTO so as to obtain a condemnation of the American measures. We will not be doing this on our own: this is not a conflict between the European Union and the United States; it is a much broader conflict because these measures are going to disrupt the steel market throughout the world.
This decision is a flagrant violation of the provisions of the WTO safeguard clause, which provide that such measures may only be implemented if imports have shown a sharp and substantial increase, which is not the case.
We are also going to ask the Americans to take measures to compensate us for the European exports hit by the American measures and, depending on their reaction, we will see whether it is desirable or conceivable to suspend our tariff concessions to the United States."@en1
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