Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-13-Speech-3-054"
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"en.20020313.3.3-054"2
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"Mr President, the announcement last week was bad enough. The comments from some US officials, including Mr Aldonas, that somehow protectionism is warranted to correct wider macroeconomic factors is potentially even worse. It displays a dangerous and economically illiterate philosophy that needs to be strongly rebuffed. The question is: how do we rebuff it?
Firstly, we need to ensure that we consolidate our friendships with those allies with whom we wish to act together against American unilateralism. And if there is one tactical concern my group has about brandishing safeguard measures against those steel exports that might be diverted from the US to Europe, it is that it might actually alienate countries such as Russia, India and Brazil, with whom we have to act together in the WTO and the OECD to take on this American move. Therefore, we would ask the Commission and, of course, the Council, as a matter of urgency to try and negotiate bilateral voluntary export restraint agreements with these countries, so as to avoid the diversion from steel going to America to Europe happening in the first place. The obvious danger if we do not achieve this is that we end up having spats with precisely the people we should be teaming up with against this American behaviour.
The second point is this: let us not be squeamish; this decision was taken for domestic political reasons. It will only be reversed or limited if domestic political pressures dictate that should be the case. In order to do that, we need to brandish big sticks which are felt on the domestic US political scene. And conveniently enough, if inelegantly, we do have such a big stick, in the form of the measures we can take within the context of the foreign sales cooperation dispute. Of course, we do not wish to mix these things formally; but let us not be naive. The FSC dispute provides us with the best means by which to inflict the domestic pressure which is absolutely necessary in order to get some change in the American attitude and to reassert the international rule of law, rather than the rule of the law of George Bush's economic jungle."@en1
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