Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-22-Speech-2-375"
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"en.20070522.30.2-375"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, since we are, today, discussing the Council’s report on the CFSP in the Council’s absence, I am all the more grateful to the Commission, and to Commissioner Ferrero-Waldner, for being present with us. It certainly says something about this House that the only official report produced on the Common Foreign and Security Policy ends up being discussed at night.
I believe that, in past years, and specifically in the period under consideration here, cooperation with the Commission on the Common Foreign and Security Policy went extraordinarily well, as indeed it did with the Council in many areas.
Over this time, we made considerable progress in developing the neighbourhood policy and on policy relating to the Balkans; we also became more able to take up positions in relation to the area of security and defence policy, so that the number of functions assumed by the European Union today would have been scarcely imaginable five years ago. It is for this reason that the European Union’s present and unprecedented ability – whether in the Middle East or in relation to Iran – to recruit other countries to our own strategy, which combines prevention, civil crisis management and military capacity, rather than relying on military strength alone, which I will sum up as the idea of the European Union’s ‘soft power’ as a global standard, must be accounted a triumph.
At the same time, we have to ask ourselves whether, despite the progress we have made, we are able to fully meet the challenges we face, I ask you to bear with me as I observe that it is in the fields covered by the Foreign and Security Policy that it is vital, even to our own continued existence, that the Constitutional Treaty become a reality, and so it is with this issue in mind, as also in these present days and weeks in which we are moving towards the next Intergovernmental Conference, that we must make clear that this is one of the indispensable components of the Constitutional Treaty, for what we and the Commission agree on is the need for us to put our capacities in more coherent order.
I think it important that we take certain steps even before the event; for example, I would encourage the Commission to push through the expansion of its delegations, which are present in 120 countries, in such a way that the other institutions can avail themselves of their services even before the External Service for which provision is made in the Constitutional Treaty, is in place. Since the Council is not present and cannot hear what is being said, I can also say that this would be a splendid opportunity to demonstrate that such an External Service should, both now and in the future, come under the authority of the Commission, and that it does not need to be an independent institution. We will acquire all the more capacity to act if, on this front, we adopt even now the sensible practice of the
The European Union is represented in 120 countries by Commission delegations, and it is the biggest trading power in the world, accounting for 20% of global trade; its gross domestic product is greater than that of the United States of America – not
it must be admitted, but overall – and, if we succeed in putting that into political language, language, moreover, that speaks of a position founded less on military might alone than on ‘soft power’, then we can be in a position to equip the trans-Atlantic alliance for action, and to do so, moreover, on an equal footing, thereby exercising influence as equal partners, as we recently did with the Trans-Atlantic Economic Agreement, which signifies for us an important forward step in the continuation of relations with the United States, which is, and will continue to be in future, our ally and partner. We cannot remain equidistant from Russia and America, for, on the contrary, the USA are, in terms of their values, our primary partner, and that has to be made quite clear when talking of these things in order to prevent misunderstandings arising concerning them.
When matters such as these are in hand, whether one agrees or not with the current government’s policies becomes a secondary consideration.
At the same time, though, it has to be clear to us that we can achieve this level of influence only if we act together. Solidarity also means solidarity with the outside world. I would like to thank the President-in-Office and the German Presidency of the Council as a whole for joining together with the Commission in order to demonstrate that in Samara, where they really did not waste any time in making it plain that they would not allow themselves to be divided. While we must not allow the Americans to divide us into the ‘old’ Europe and the ‘new’, nor must we allow our neighbour to the East to think that the quality of security differs from one region to another and that it can have more influence over some than over others. Every state in Europe and throughout the world must be free to decide for itself to which alliance and which community it wishes to belong, and no neighbour, as big as it may be, must try to influence it to change its mind; that idea – that every country takes for itself the decision as to which community it wants to belong to – is at the heart of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Even so, it has to be clear to us just how important this great neighbour is to us as regards energy and in relation to other issues too, and that is why we have to ensure that the strategic partnership with Russia is built on, for I would prefer to see a democratic Russia of that sort on our side rather than on that of Iran."@en1
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