Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-12-Speech-3-031"
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"en.20030312.1.3-031"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, if the prospect of a new disaster, so costly in terms of human life, were not haunting our minds today, we would say that this crisis has served in a remarkable way to reveal the world as it is now. It brings to light those truths that the advocates of sovereign states – albeit crying in the wilderness – have been declaring for so long, truths that are suddenly starting to be regarded as self-evident.
The first of these self-evident truths is that the actors in international affairs are not blocs, or particular sets of civilisations hastily divided up in order to comply with an imperial and vaguely racial interpretation of the world. The real actors are still the nation states. There is no longer any united international community, there is no united West, any more than there is a united Europe. The West, the so-called international community, and Europe, have been completely shattered. So, incidentally, has the East, the region that poor Samuel Huntington so foolishly referred to as ‘the Moslem world’, but which includes both nations which are in favour of the war, such as Kuwait, and nations which are against it, such as many Arab countries, and even countries which have abstained from deciding one way or the other, such as Pakistan. Europe, of course, is no more united than any of the others, because it is here, within this poor assembly, supposedly committed to a laughable common foreign and security policy, that we find the fiercest defenders of the US line, together with its most determined opponents. In short, in both the North and in the South, each nation decides for itself, regardless of any illusion of solidarity, and the lone Anglo-Saxon knight is not the only one to have struck a fatal blow to the old multilateralism that was so much in vogue in the twentieth century. No, the nation states are the only ones left, and we are happy that proof of this has been provided in such a glaringly obvious way.
What a revelation this is, too, of the real nature of America, or rather, I should say of the United States, since it has no authority to claim to speak on behalf of a whole continent, as brave Chile has just demonstrated. In reality, the United States is doing nothing more than defending its interests at the most trivial level, and even that is not so certain, because what we are seeing is a small clique, obsessed by power, sliding towards war, something that forms part of the very nature of empire. That is also something that we have always claimed, namely that empire equals war. The nation state, on the other hand, is the only possible way to bring about the non-totalitarian unification of the world.
As for France, the crisis has revealed her as she is, and as she always will be, the only real rampart, defending against empires the freedom of the people, which is another name for the freedom ..."@en1
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