Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-11-21-Speech-3-428-000"
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"en.20121121.27.3-428-000"2
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"Mr President, Minister, ladies and gentlemen, I do not need to list today all of the crises and threats that affect our security and the stability of our continent and its neighbours. Every day – as we have just heard – we hear new reasons that lead us to believe that this multipolar world at the start of the 21
century is in many regards more dangerous than the world we had become used to because it is less predictable and less organised: civil war in Syria, Israeli-Arab tensions, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, clashes and crime in the Sahel, piracy off the coast of Somalia and continued fighting in Congo, to list just today’s dangers.
The economic and strategic crises must not be used as an excuse – and this is important, Mr President – to turn our backs, but should instead be an opportunity to strengthen our common ambition.
In light of this situation, it would be irresponsible to think of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) as a luxury or a bit of an aside. It is a policy that is undoubtedly recent and still being formed. More than any other policy at EU level, it is a policy that is based on the Member States, on their material and human capacities, on their traditions and on their political desire to share, or not, as the case may be, their almost absolute sovereignty in diplomatic and military matters.
This leads too many observers – and too many Members here – to believe that the CSDP is negligible or a pointless illusion. On the contrary, we believe – without any naivety or excess illusions – that the CSDP is a strategic necessity for the European Union. That is also why it appears in full in the Treaty of Lisbon.
The European Union simply cannot continue just to systematically delegate its security and that of its neighbours. Of course, NATO, which brings together 21 of the 27 Member States, is still the cornerstone of the continent’s common defence, and we should be pleased about that. In addition, we must reaffirm the transatlantic partnership, which is irreplaceable, but it does not exclude efforts and ambitions on the part of the European countries themselves; on the contrary. Indeed, the United States, which has begun a real strategic shift towards Asia and the Pacific is calling on us in Europe to be more active, more robust, more sure of ourselves when it comes to security and defence.
Those who call into question the CSDP and say that it duplicates work must realise that it offers pragmatic and intelligent complementarity when it comes to NATO, a military organisation, and the European Union. There are some crises that affect our security and in which NATO cannot intervene; Georgia was one example, and the same applies generally to the African conflicts, where the United States does not feel obliged to intervene, as we saw with the recent example of Libya. Unfortunately, these examples could increase in the future.
Action by the European Union is often completely legitimate because its actions comply fully with international law, and there are few third countries that do not acknowledge its balanced role without any ambiguous, unilateral ambitions. It has many ways to act; it has the excellent civilian/military global approach and it is the only body to have this.
All too often, unfortunately, what we are missing is political will – above all, on the part of the Member States: a lack of political will – and we have to emphasise this, too – or motivation on the part of certain Brussels institutions that are in charge of the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the CSDP, a lack of vision at times, a reluctance to act in the Council, an ideological reluctance because we believe that soft power is more effective that the use of an armed force, and an absence of clear priorities that, too often, give the impression that we are making it up as we go along.
The strategic challenges that we face are enormous and unprecedented: a structural and sustainable reduction in the defence budgets of European countries, the reorientation of US priorities, volatility and an extremely diverse range of threats. Therefore, the Member States either have to undergo a major and collective strategic downgrade, or pick themselves up and exploit as best they can, the potential of the CSDP, modest as it still may be.
There is no doubt that most of our efforts today should focus on capacity-building, and in this regard we emphasise in the report the virtues of the pooling and sharing initiative promoted by the European Defence Agency, which is a step in the right direction."@en1
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