Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-09-23-Speech-4-015"
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"en.20100923.2.4-015"2
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"Mr President, ensuring a stable and prosperous neighbourhood is the first priority of European foreign policy. It is in its neighbourhood that the EU can best exercise its soft stabilising power. It is also there that it needs to assess strategies and possibly replace them with other more relevant forms of engagement.
According to the ENPI Regulation, the objective of the instrument is to provide Community assistance for the development of an area of prosperity and good neighbourliness. However, the ENPI should reflect better the needs and challenges. If the EU wants to be seen not just as a cash cow, but as a real regional power, it will also need to prove itself able to help resolve conflicts through this work and in the neighbourhood.
Stability and prosperity are periodically threatened by the resurgence of unresolved conflicts. These undermine to a great extent the EU’s multilateral initiatives, both in the east – for instance in the Caucasus – and in the south – the Middle East and Western Sahara, for example. The EU’s ambition to resolve and step up its role should be realised, and tailor-made assistance in these regions should be directed at confidence building and reconciliation as well.
The focus on bilateral relations has made it difficult for the Union to act as a mediator in conflicts. The EU should really focus more on multilateral cooperation, no matter how difficult it is, as Commissioner Füle stated. The regional approach should be stronger and more visible. It should be combined also with enhanced cooperation among the partner countries themselves, especially among the neighbouring ones. For example, the degree of cooperation integration in the EU eastern neighbourhood is quite low. There are reasons for this, there are difficulties with this, but we should act together to overcome them.
The CBC Black Sea initiative seems not to be enough to address all this. The definition of the cross-border cooperation aim is to promote economic and social development in border areas, address common challenges, ensure efficient and secure borders and promote people-to-people cooperation.
Better coordination should also be ensured between the ENPI and the cross-border cooperation programmes and the national ENPI action plan. There should be careful consideration about the real added value of every ENPI initiative, otherwise the EU risks getting involved, and even getting lost, in the obligation and overlapping, which currently happens often with a number of Community programmes.
Commissioner Füle has given us some reassurances in this respect. Consultation of stakeholders and closer work with the Committee on Regional Development in Parliament should help. We should work together for more effective and visible results."@en1
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