Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-08-Speech-4-012"
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"en.20050908.4.4-012"2
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".
Mr President, I wish to thank the Commissioner for his very full, descriptive statement on the Northern Dimension and also for sharing with us some of the thoughts about the future. It is about the future – what comes after 2006 – that there is much concern.
Over the last six years, I have had the privilege to represent this Parliament on a number of parliamentary bodies in the Arctic, Barents and Baltic region. It is quite clear that our parliamentary colleagues on those bodies look to this Parliament and the European Union to provide a robust and functioning Northern Dimension policy. It is somewhat ironic that this is a policy that is normally played out at a regional level and it is therefore absolutely essential that it involves elected Members and all other stakeholders, as the Commissioner has said.
However, it is a policy that tends to be set at the biannual ministerial meetings. Therefore this Parliament has sometimes suggested that some form of Northern Dimension forum, bringing in all the stakeholders and elected representatives, would be a good idea for the future. We must give this policy bottom-up motion so that it is really working and dynamic and represents the wishes of the area it is there to serve. Also, the original Northern Dimension had a wide vision of a policy from the Urals to Greenland, encompassing the Arctic and the subarctic region.
It is right that we concentrate much effort on our relationship with Russia, and there is much that can be done there. If we have a dynamic St Petersburg, then the Baltic itself will be dynamic and that even reflects on trade in the area I know best – the north-east coast of the United Kingdom. So it can benefit all of us and we must take an interest. However, it must be a shared policy in partnership with Russia, not a covert way of directing some EU policy towards Russia.
As has already been mentioned, we must also bring in our other partners, Norway and Iceland. The Norwegian Government has recently produced a very full policy document for discussion on the High North. It wants European Union involvement. We should respond to that. This fragile area of our world gives us the opportunity to cooperate with many partners and even to have dialogue with the US on climate change. We should seize that opportunity within a wider Northern Dimension policy."@en1
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