Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-15-Speech-3-304"
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"en.20060315.24.3-304"2
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".
Mr President, I would like to take advantage of this debate to congratulate the bureau of the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly on the communication that it has published on the infamous cartoons. The figure of Mohammed is what we might call the point of communion for an Islam that is more fragile and diverse, and even more divided, than we might think. Targeting that figure means targeting its heart. There is no way we could not have known that, just as there is no way we could not have considered the consequences of what was being done, namely inflaming the conflict between civilisations. Who exactly do these cartoons serve: who has an interest in stirring up these conflicts? I would like to put that question. Certainly not us, the Europeans, surely not France anyway, which is the main Mediterranean coastal power and whose influence depends on a fine balance between its European continental policy, on the one hand, and its Mediterranean and African policy, on the other.
Admittedly, there comes with this statement a dual concern: on the one hand, the EMPA and Euromed are still like frail barques cast out to sea. Frail not just in terms of resources, but above all in terms of their intellectual inspiration, since it seems to me that they are still clinging to a very Eurocentric view of democracy and human rights − we have just seen yet another illustration of this − which not only smells of colonialism, but which furthermore prevents us − we saw this in December in Barcelona as well − from dealing with what is really important, that is to say, economic, financial and commercial cooperation and the management of migratory flows. Contrary to what the Commission has just said, I personally would talk about cooperation, rather than a free-trade area, which I believe to be a very dangerous formula.
The second concern is that the issue of civilisations has been an obvious one for a very long time, which we have known about since Charles Martel: we have not had to wait for American thinkers to point it out to us. One would have to be foolishly immersed in the delusions of globalisation to be all of a sudden amazed to discover that civilisations are not interchangeable and men even less so, and that coexistence between different peoples is not automatic. This kind of Huntington approach is clearly intended to send a different message, namely that we are all destined to be part of a ‘West’ − in emphatic inverted commas − the capital of which would have to be Washington, with the Europeans simply having to follow the warlike ventures of the United States. This very idea of the West is, as we know, an ideological sham. It is precisely because civilisations endlessly clash that we need a policy, that we need politics, that we need a will to live collectively, something for which, in short, the EMPA and Euromed offer a framework. So let us begin by strengthening them, since it seems to me that they are getting increasingly fragile while becoming increasingly necessary year by year."@en1
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