Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-05-Speech-2-128"
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"en.19991005.8.2-128"2
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"Mr President, as a representative of an agricultural country, France, and more importantly of a country which has linked its name and its policies with a particular concept of cooperation with Africa, we cannot go in the direction Mrs Kinnock is leading us, and as a result, we cannot approve the so-called trade and cooperation agreement with the Republic of South Africa, both because of its form and its content.
The problems of content are quite obvious. The first problem concerns the nature of the settlement on the registered designation of origin. To grant financial compensation to a country in order for it to stop its improper use of protected names – such as sherry, to give an individual case – sets an extremely dangerous precedent. It is obvious, moreover, that if this agreement were ratified by national governments, whose main role, I just mention in passing, has been proven once more, any non-EU country could decide to use a European official designation of origin in order then to negotiate a financial settlement. This is absurd.
The second problem with the content strikes us as being even more serious. It concerns the very philosophy, or rather the ideology, implicit in this agreement. To claim that the liberalisation of trade is a priori favourable to development certainly adheres to the creed of globalisation which is holding sway everywhere, but reality continually shows these allegations to be false. Firstly, it is obvious that poor countries are being dragged further and further down as their borders are increasingly opened up and their essential services increasingly privatised. Moreover, the countries which are already dominant today have guaranteed their own expansion within the framework of a planned protectionist system, and it is this protectionism that I hope and pray for. The agreement corresponds to an ideology whose sole aim is to mask the pernicious policy of a commercial superpower, the United States, and in this area as in many others, Europe has gone astray as a result of clinging to the Americans’ heels.
As to the form of the agreement, I shall just mention it briefly. It gives an additional illustration of the connivance between the Commission and Parliament aimed at divesting the European Council of something that I believe to be its exclusive competence, which is foreign policy.
For all of these reasons, we cannot give our approval to this agreement."@en1
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