Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-18-Speech-3-079"
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"en.20030618.7.3-079"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, Mr Solana, ladies and gentlemen, it is my belief that events in the current and previous year have made apparent our real need for clear thinking on this issue. Commissioner Patten has described the many areas in which the European Union is actively involved, and it might well make sense for us to view them as parts of a coherent whole in order to make clear how much these – in many areas, thoroughly presentable – instruments benefit each other. This is where issues connected to overseas and development aid will of course be of correspondingly great importance. What this means is that potential tensions need to be reduced where the prevention of poverty is concerned, and both those actively involved and the European public need to become more aware of the fact that these are also instruments whereby we conduct foreign policy, and that they are in the interests of our Member States.
In the context of this discussion about prevention, an area in which so much is being done, Mr Solana is indeed right to say, as he has done in this debate, that we have to find the right combination of prevention, military capacity, and the measures needed for reconstruction in the aftermath of action. I believe that there is something missing here, either in terms of awareness or of practice. If – as we are right to do – we do indeed perform these preventive tasks, we see that they, in themselves, do not give the European Union any greater influence, as the military option has to be available to us if we are to be able to make it clear that we could also take other kinds of action. This was our experience in the Balkans in the early 1990s, when the European negotiators brought about some thirty-four ceasefire agreements – I am not sure precisely how many – and the reason why none of them came to anything was that Milosevic knew perfectly well that we lacked the military capacity to ensure that these ceasefire agreements were kept to. Bit by bit, right up to the Cologne Summit, and, beyond that, in Saint-Malo and on many other occasions, we learned the necessary lessons from this, which have now enabled us to progress further.
Here, too, though, we see that this must first be incorporated into a real strategy, that it is not yet fully operational, and that we do not yet know how it is to work, as, of course, we have to evaluate certain of its constituent parts in relation to this. What priority do we in fact give to combating terrorism, and to what extent do the instruments enable us to do that? The argument adduced by the Americans in relation to the war in Iraq was also to some degree an argument about terrorism. Are we ourselves clear in our own minds about the extent to which traditional military means can be deployed to combat terrorism? The same applies to the area of non-proliferation. If we could do as – for example – the Israelis did in Iraq in the early 1980s, and destroy a nuclear power plant with a single pre-emptive strike, thereby preventing the development of any nuclear capability, could this be part of such a strategy, one that might enable us, with less or scarcely any loss of human life, to develop capacities to prevent immense dangers and subsequent wars? I believe that we have to answer these questions. On this occasion, I am framing them as questions, but they ought to form part of a specific and consistent approach if we are to be able to put something on the table in the way that the Bush administration has done, where we can identify both similarities and differences and will very definitely be enabled to conduct on a stable basis the dialogue with the United States that is necessary if we are to start working together or perhaps achieve a rapprochement, and that will help enable the Americans to abandon unilateralism.
I agree that the European Union is itself a security policy measure; that is one of the primary reasons for its existence. The wider Europe that this is intended, astutely enough, to organise on a multilateral rather than merely bilateral basis, which is meant to be the European Economic Area with something added; our relations with Russia and the developing world and also with the Mediterranean countries – all these things are vitally important, but, in this context, we must indeed give some thought to the future of our relations with the United States, and it is my belief that, in the long term, NATO will not, on its own, be a sustainable bond between us. As regards NATO and transatlantic relations, there are two conditions, which we too must fulfil: only if we are strong will we be partners to be taken seriously, and there is no partnership when, rather than both sharing in decisions, one partner takes the decisions and the other merely follows behind. We have to play our part in creating the right conditions.
The second point in relation to all this is that we have to put our relations on a broader basis, one that has to do with more than security policy and the military, and that is why we need again to seize the initiative and have the sort of discussions that we had at the beginning of the 1990s, which I might perhaps sum up under the heading of ‘transatlantic market place’ in order, on this basis, to put something in place in many of the areas in which the European Union is competent. We, and the USA, have treaties with every country on earth, but we have no treaty with each other. If such a strategy is to be complete, I believe that we should give some thought to this."@en1
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