Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-29-Speech-4-033"
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"en.20040129.1.4-033"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this report is splendid, and it is even more splendid that we will, in a few minutes, be able to welcome the current Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan.
I would of course like to take this moment to recall that there have already been three UN Secretaries-General who hailed from Europe: Trygve Lie, Dag Hammarskjöld
and Kurt Waldheim, and that Europe is home to two permanent UN offices, in Geneva and Vienna. This means that we share responsibility to a large extent. Not only do we have claims upon each other, but we also have to take joint action and support each other. The most recent UN Secretary-General to come from Europe, Kurt Waldheim, wrote this in his book ‘Die Antwort’: ‘I have to concede that the UN, notwithstanding all our efforts and our unquestionable sincerity, has not yet managed to break with the political habits and attitudes of past centuries and to come to terms with the new realities with which we have to live. Its capacity for effective action is limited by its own faults. The charge is laid against us that it produces more rhetoric than action, that it is ineffective and is often ignored, and that the system under which every state has a vote allows the developing world to dominate the decision-making process, in that the number of votes bears no relation to the capacity to act.’ The same could also be said of the European Union; both of us are in need of reform. The two of us have a great deal in common. Success is dependent on political will and the determination of the Member States. It depends on acceptance and implementation – of Community law in one case, and of the United Nations Charter in the other. It is dependent upon multilateral cooperation, global responsibility and upon our thinking along Community-oriented lines rather than nationalistically. We can make our contribution if France and England leave the Security Council and the EU joins it; we would thereby be reforming the EU and our own Common Foreign and Security Policy, and forcing through a reform of the UN Security Council."@en1
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