Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-15-Speech-3-282"

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"en.20061115.21.3-282"2
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"Madam President, the drawing up of the European Security Strategy was influenced by three great debates of an international nature: the debate on the new threats that had to be faced and on how to face them, particularly following 11 September; that on the problems faced by the United Nations as a universal and multilateral forum for preventing and managing disputes; and that on the commitments to be made by the European Union in order to become a more active, capable and coherent actor at world level. The European Security Strategy therefore points out that the greatest challenges that the European Union and its citizens must face today are international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, failed States and organised crime. I naturally agree that those problems are important. I fear, however, that this list does not place sufficient emphasis on other aspects that I believe are just as important, if not more so. I am talking, for example, about poverty, the lack of a global justice system, the collective criminalisation of groups and communities, the increasing militarisation of the planet, the plundering of the basic subsistence resources of the poorest countries by the rich countries, the pollution of the environment and the destruction of social ecosystems. In this regard, I do not believe that the European Union always offers the most appropriate response, in either political or structural terms. Hence, for some time we have been hearing arguments in favour of creating a single European army, for example. Nevertheless, that army is usually seen as an addition, or, if you like, a complement, to the 25 existing armies, and not as a replacement for them, as I believe it should be. Though we apparently agree that, in order to deal with the current challenges, numerous armies of a national nature are no longer necessary, we still have a European Union with 25 national armies, whose personnel amount to some two million people, whose main duty is to defend the Member States’ borders and interests and which jointly cost more than EUR 160 million per year. Furthermore, these are figures that many of us would like to see dedicated to the prevention and management of conflicts. In short, the actions and decisions of the governments do not currently appear to be consistent with the change of attitude towards security that we have been seeing recently, particularly at European level."@en1

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