Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-11-17-Speech-3-025"
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"en.19991117.2.3-025"2
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"Madam President, Mr Solana, I opposed the action of the Secretary-General of NATO. I welcome Mr CFSP’s taking office.
In fulfilling your new role, you will find my group a demanding partner, extremely critical, if necessary, but deeply convinced that the European Union must be represented to a much greater extent, more active and more proactive, in the international arena. Wherever you go in Africa, in the Mediterranean, in Latin America, in Asia, everywhere you can gauge the degree of expectation there is for a major ally, which is capable and resolved to assist them in extricating themselves from the demanding showdown against America which is arrogant and too powerful.
What splendid challenges you could devote yourself to accepting on behalf of the Fifteen: establishing yourself as a protagonist in your own right in the Near East in order to contribute towards establishing a just and lasting peace, as now seems possible; launching the Lomé negotiations once again on new bases, integrating the concerns of our 71 partners in the south, in order to safeguard the spirit of this Convention which is unique in the world; addressing international financial institutions with an alternative opinion, for example, in favour of cancelling the debt of those countries which are today arrested in their development because of this infernal mechanism; starting a real international crusade in favour of disarmament, particularly nuclear disarmament, at this time when there is great danger once again of proliferation; establishing yourself as the spokesperson, the standard-bearer for the enhancement of the United Nations’ system again, ensuring that the UN Charter is respected, promoting a form of civilised international relations, forever doing away with war as the means of settling disputes, and, in the short term, if you please, putting an end to the intolerable inertia of the Union as regards the savage war in Chechnya by some means other than a few purely formal communiqués.
Finally, I invite you, High Representative, to make a courageous and critical assessment of the war in the Balkans. In Kosovo, we face a serious policy failure, as one form of nationalism succeeds another, as one form of ethnic cleansing succeeds another, this time with the Union, the UN and NATO in attendance. In the rest of Yugoslavia, an Iraq-style scenario is in progress. The power, which is legitimately censured, is still firmly in place, while the population, which is unfairly penalised, is enduring a martyrdom which is morally unacceptable and politically dangerous. As for the region, it is anything but stabilised. These realities cannot fail to be of direct concern to you.
So, do not take as the only lesson to be drawn from this terrible experience the need to be able to line up more troops, to increase military expenditure and to advance at the double towards the Europe of Defence within, what is more, the framework of NATO.
I am not seeking to draw a veil over the military aspect of security, but the key factor, in my opinion, is that this strategy continues to be obsessed by military matters, at the expense of a major pan-European policy for the prevention of conflict capable of dealing with the tensions and splits of the post-Cold War period on this continent. To give just one illustration of this imbalance: tomorrow, as you very briefly mentioned, fifty European Heads of State are to meet in Istanbul at the OSCE Summit dedicated to drawing up a security charter for the twenty-first century. But how many people know about this? How many people are talking about this? The Council representative did not even consider the request I made for a debate in the European Parliament prior to this conference to be appropriate. Revitalising the OSCE, re-establishing it, making its debates open to the public of European society, that is one more grand design, which is, in my opinion, inseparable from the prospect of enlargement of the Union.
This is the constructive message that I wished to convey to you today on behalf of my group."@en1
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