Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-29-Speech-3-124"
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"en.20001129.8.3-124"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the European Union has yet to substantiate adequately its claim to exercise responsibility for peace and above all for lasting stability in the world. Yet the Union would be unrivalled in that domain if only it would improve the existing instruments and especially its present potential for civilian conflict prevention and apply them coherently. The unfortunate fact is that the trauma of Kosovo was followed by a hectic flurry of activity which was channelled in an entirely wrong direction. Concentration on purely reactive crisis management has thrown the common foreign and security policy totally out of synch. No government would take responsibility for sending its country's troops into a region on an open-ended assignment without clear political objectives.
But there are no clear political objectives, and there is still effectively no common foreign and security policy. National interests continue to prevail, especially when diplomatic activity is on the agenda. We have just seen the examples in The Hague. We have the example of the Middle East conflict. It is absurd to detach European foreign policy from the institutions responsible for most of the instruments that are essential to its pursuit. These are not my own words; they were spoken by Commissioner Patten, and he is perfectly correct. It is equally absurd to concentrate the bulk of the available financial resources on military equipment. If we perceive European foreign policy as nothing more than a support instrument for European arms-manufacturing consortia, we have completely misunderstood its function. It can only recover credibility if the civilian approach is its supreme guiding principle, if the instruments at its disposal are used in pursuit of effective prevention and if those instruments receive a level of funding that maintains their credibility. Neglect of this wide range of instruments of non-military conflict prevention would turn out to be a mistake in the long run, and in that respect I am dissatisfied with the Council's statements to the effect that we have already taken decisions, but that things will move in this general direction. This is by no means certain, because it is also apparent that these decisions are based entirely on the reactive approach.
Civilian conflict prevention, and I stress the word 'prevention', cannot be a mere appendage of military intervention. It will not be fully effective until we have overcome the trauma of Kosovo and Srebrenica, until we return to a policy of active prevention and begin to deploy our available resources long before the alarm bells start ringing and until we are fully committed to defusing potential crises and eliminating possible causes of escalation. This means that curbing arms exports to unstable regions must be the first aim for the Council to pursue, that trade policies must be fair, that assistance must be given to encourage the sustainable development of countries in volatile regions and, above all, that the democratic forces in civil society must be supported. The promotion of regional cooperation is another valuable instrument. The EU has only one problem in this domain, namely the fact that it has yet to arouse public interest in this sort of action, even though such measures are considerably more sustainable and effective than military intervention."@en1
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