Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-11-16-Speech-3-320"
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"en.20051116.21.3-320"2
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"Mr President, I would like to begin by adding my voice to Mr Matsakis’s protest. During my twenty years in this Parliament, I have never seen a Member behave with such disdain towards this institution and its Members. I would therefore ask that effective action be taken against that Member, so that there may be no further incidents such as that one.
As Mr von Wogau has said, this is not a debate about arms; it is a broader debate, it is a debate on common foreign and security policy, although I will only be able to comment on the report by Mr Wuermeling, on defence procurement.
I believe that the Commission is right to point out that Article 296 of the Treaty establishing the European Community, which currently represents a constitutional obstacle to the development of what we may call a European defence market, may to a certain extent be overcome on the basis of the judgments of the Court of Justice in recent cases, such as the Johnston case, or the case of the Commission against Spain, of 1997.
Constitutional restrictions remain however. That is to say, in the field of foreign and defence policy, there is still a high degree of state sovereignty.
In this field, therefore, we must act very prudently, from legal and political points of view. Until the European Constitution is adopted, which I hope can be done soon, we will have to make do with the legal instruments we have, and there is little we can do with those instruments, but I am very pleased that the Commission is gearing its work, firstly towards a Communication and, possibly, towards a proposal for a Directive, as Mr Wuermeling suggests.
We must, however, be prudent from a political point of view, because the objective of a common European defence market cannot be to transform the European Union into a military industrial complex, as in the case of certain foreign powers.
Arms are dangerous. I have some military training; what surprised me was that, most of the time, I was not being taught to kill, but rather to protect myself against arms. Arms are not toys. We cannot use them, for example, for economic or industrial development. The purpose of arms must be to protect the European citizens and also to protect those friendly, peaceful and democratic nations that need them for their own defence, but not to do business with them or to turn Europe into a kind of enormous industrial market place which, at the end of the day, will come back to haunt us.
I believe that the Commission’s proposals are positive, that these proposals will lead to the creation of that common defence market, but that the common defence market must be an instrument for achieving peace in Europe and also peace throughout the world."@en1
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