Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-02-01-Speech-3-021"
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"en.20060201.11.3-021"2
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".
Mr President, Mr High Representative, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, considering where European foreign and security policy started off from several years ago, we cannot do other than observe that those involved in it can point to some extraordinary achievements, that hitherto impossible things are being achieved in the Balkans, through the EU troika and in many other areas, and that the European Union, through its enlargement policy, its neighbourhood policy, its Mediterranean policy and much else, has made a major contribution to global stability.
As Mr Solana said, this multilateral approach is one reason why the world wants European foreign policy. The public want it too; nothing matters so much to them as that we should take joint action in this area, and that imposes on us the obligation to join with our counterparts at the national level in putting the half measures of the past behind us and agreeing on ways to secure our citizens’ right to life.
Parliament has been constantly supportive of this work and is well aware of its own inability to actively engage in foreign policy, that being a task for the executive. While it must, however, be open to Parliament to monitor it, the position we are in prevents us from doing so to an adequate degree, since we are mainly informed after the event and no priority is given to our being included in the discussion process. There is room for improvement here; we need to move things on in line with this interpretation of Article 21, and I hope that we will be able to use peaceful means in getting the Council and the Commission to agree to this.
It must also be clear to us, though, that this House has so far been able to bring forward little other than budgetary arguments in its attempts to get its way, and we have to move on from this if this House is to be better enabled to monitor and be consulted.
One might ask, by way of an example, what is going on in the Congo? We have all read in the newspapers about the plans that are being considered for military intervention there, but at no stage of the proceedings has anyone thought to give this House or the relevant committee within it prior notice of this. I do not think that we can go on like this.
Although I did say that a lot of good things had been achieved, it is possible to regard a glass as either half full or half empty. We are in a much more difficult situation than we were a year ago; far from being something that can be blamed on European policy, this is a matter of the way things are, and Mr Solana gave a few examples at the beginning of the year. Consider, if you will, the state of affairs in Iran, where we are laboriously endeavouring to get talks underway, and where nobody has any real idea of how to prevent matters escalating now there is the possibility of Iraq ending up with a Shiite government that could ally itself with Iran, in view of the Palestinian elections having been won by Hamas, which is linked with and funded by Iran, not to mention Hezbollah and all the rest of it. If you consider what this scenario means in terms of world peace, and might also mean in terms of the security of our energy supply, bearing in mind at the same time the way in which a politically resurrected Russia uses energy as a political instrument, causing countries in our neighbourhood to fear for the maintenance of their independence and freedom to make decisions for themselves, then it can be a depressing one. And that is just a small sample. The whole scenario shows that we, in the European Union, are in a worse position in terms of foreign policy than we were a year ago, and that we therefore need to come up with a strategy for dealing with the situation. We must become much more pro-active and, whether dealing with the Ukraine situation or energy policy in general, establish connections in such a way that no single country is penalised, but that, rather, we join together in defending our interests. Our Member States and our neighbours must come to understand that we have no chance of defending our interests unless we do so together rather than each looking after his own. None of us can save ourselves; it is only together that we can defend our own interests, and this is something that has to be spelled out with greater clarity.
We have something to contribute, and one place in which we can do so is the Balkans, where, this year, there is to be a referendum in Montenegro and negotiations on the status of Kosovo, and so important decisions are in the offing. The question of how we involve Serbia in all this is one of the really big and difficult issues with which we have to deal. There must also be a marked improvement in trans-Atlantic relations, so that, through the values we share, order may be brought into the scenario I described earlier.
That also means that we have to be strong enough to have an influence on American policy, which means reinforcing the preventive dimension of policy and its character as a dialogue, in order to ensure greater security in a multilateral world.
It means that we have to sharpen up some of our instruments. We would like to see Mr Solana become Europe’s Foreign Minister on 1 January 2007; while the failure of the Constitution means that he will not, another consequence of that is that the instruments need to be improved in order to maximise the effectiveness of all the institutions rather than have them working against each other."@en1
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