Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-11-Speech-2-164"
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"en.20000411.7.2-164"2
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"Firstly, on visibility: there is an early paragraph in this pretty lengthy communication which, in my judgement, sums up the problem rather well. It states that EU visibility is not as ever-present as one would like because of a number of factors. The first is the lack of a clear EU policy and the necessary instruments to implement it. The adoption of a CFSP joint action is no guarantee of increased visibility, as people found in Nigeria last year.
Another factor is the participation of the European Union under the umbrella of other international actors. That has often been a problem in the Balkans, and one with which the honourable Member will be familiar. In other cases, like Palestine, the lack of visibility was due to insufficient effort with the media.
Then we finish perhaps a shade provocatively: "Unlike the United States the European Union does not appoint retired high-level politicians for this kind of job." We have politicians who are actually still in the kitchen feeling the heat. Maybe we should learn something from that, though I agree that there are some important high-level retired politicians whom one would not want to see necessarily supervising elections. At which point discretion is the better part of valour.
Secondly, as far as the rapid reaction facility is concerned, I want to see this up and running as quickly as possible. I have enough anecdotes to justify my impatience. I have no doubt at all that our "energy for democracy" programme, which I mentioned in my remarks, has been an extraordinary success. The mayor of one of the towns which has benefited wrote last week to his colleagues in the Serbian opposition making that point. We are now looking at what we can do during the summer, now the winter emergency is over, to build on it.
Nor have I any doubt at all that the tortures of the damned which our officials had to go through to get the scheme launched would have been much easier to cope with had we had a facility like this. Anybody who thinks that we do not need one should just try talking to our officials who were operating pillar 4 in UNMIK in Kosovo. Again, there is a legion of almost unbelievable stories which underline the importance of a facility like this – a facility that is not a cop-out, not a way of getting round budgetary procedures but one that allows us within our existing budget to do things more effectively and more flexibly.
Of course, if you can act more rapidly, you make a contribution to crisis prevention. It is one of the oldest saws in the book that it is incomparably more expensive to fight a war than to keep the peace. Very often what is required to keep the peace or to prevent a crisis is not just doing things generously but doing them quickly and generously. We are, as the honourable Member knows because he has been in this business much longer than I, actively involved in trying to develop an intellectually respectable case for preventative diplomacy, trying to pull together all the various non-military capacity headline goals which we think are required.
There are a number of things we will be doing. I look forward to coming to Parliament with some further ideas over the coming months."@en1
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