Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-24-Speech-3-229"
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"en.20030924.6.3-229"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, Cancún showed, firstly, that it is quite simply unrealistic to demand that markets be opened up without taking into account the existence of serious social differences. The WTO member states start from such widely divergent positions that having the same conditions for all does not promote justice but reinforces injustice, and thus takes us away from the declared objective of fair trade rather than bringing us closer to it.
Secondly, there are of course especially great differences between the industrialised and developing countries, but these blocs are far from homogeneous, any more than the European Union is a homogeneous edifice. Knowing as we do how difficult it is to get results out of the European Union, we ought to sympathise with the incomparably greater difficulties faced by a community of 148 states.
Thirdly, when negotiating, we must always put ourselves in the position of the party with whom we are negotiating; that is to say, we must be prepared to make concessions to our weaker opposite numbers without expecting anything in return. If, though, we conduct negotiations as if in a bazaar – ‘you give me one thing, and I give you another’, we should not be surprised when they fail.
Fourthly, we have to grasp the fact that the EU is only one of many regions in the world, and, in future, our decisions must take into account, to a much more marked degree, the effects they will have globally. To put it in other words, we need the impact of our policies to be assessed in a preventive way.
The fifth thing that we learn from Cancún is that negotiations have to be conducted with more candour and transparency, enabling civil society as a whole to be involved in the whole process at the right time. Is it not paradoxical that the WTO puts up fences to keep its critics out, while its alleged mission is to tear down trade barriers for the good of the world’s population? I too was in Cancún, and I think it quite utterly unacceptable that the representatives of governments, instead of seeking dialogue with the demonstrators, barred them from the venue where the negotiations were being held.
My sixth point is that the WTO needs a different organisational and decision-making structure, and should be restructured in such a way that multilateral agreements can be hammered out in a fairer and more transparent manner."@en1
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