Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-04-Speech-3-187"
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"en.20030604.5.3-187"2
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"Madam President, almost a hundred years of history shows us Europeans that whenever our continent has been in trouble the United States of America has always come to our rescue. In the First World War that became the deciding factor in preventing the expansion of imperial Germany. In the Second World War the US contribution was decisive in delivering Germany and France from Hitler’s yoke and the rest of Europe from his aspirations to power. When the Cold War ended in the break-up of the Soviet Union and the liberation of countries that had been under the yoke of Central European communism and the Soviet Union it was decidedly the result of President Ronald Reagan’s arms race, which the Soviet economy and its social system could not bear.
When we say today that relations between the United States and Europe have reached a crisis it is more about a crisis in Europe’s internal relations and a crisis in relations between certain individual countries and the United States. The way certain countries go in for unilateralism in EU internal affairs shows we are still light years away from a common foreign and security policy in crisis situations.
Most of the 25 European countries supported the approval of the UN Security Council regarding starting a war with Iraq. Most do not accept America’s insistence on being able to take up a position outside the international organisation in matters of war crimes. We disagree over the importance of the Kyoto Agreement and each day there are talks to resolve differences of opinion on economic matters. All this notwithstanding, the basic values we tend to share and considerations of security common to us both, where Europe is becoming more and more the recipient than the provider, are a firm basis for looking to the future and supporting the transatlantic partnership and genuinely constructing the kind of action programme that my colleague, James Elles, just mentioned.
We in Europe can no longer catch up with the United States in the area of defence technology; and perhaps we do not need to. We can and must, however, resolve our differences and aspire to a common foreign and defence policy. Only in this way will we be a worthy partner in matters that unite us and in those we disagree with the United States over, a partner that is sufficiently strong for our views to be heeded in the United States, whose largest trading partner we are, as we heard concerning US investment in Europe. That shows that for the United States the positive development of our relationship is important, but for us it is vital. We can accept the boycott on French wines in America if as a counterweight America places an order for a hundred Airbus planes, as was the case just a week or so ago."@en1
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