Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-09-Speech-2-143"
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"en.20020409.7.2-143"2
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". – Mr President, Minister, let me first thank Parliament for giving the Commission this opportunity to debate the vital matters covered by these motions, and let me also thank the Council presidency for the contribution it has just made through the Spanish Minister of Defence, who made an extremely interesting and important speech. I particularly endorse all that he said in his closing remarks about terrorism and the importance of giving terrorism the priority which it deserves to be given by pluralist democracies. Some Member States have a particular concern about defeating terrorism in all its manifestations.
We are ready to play our part as I say. But we need to proceed in such matters in close cooperation with Member States who retain national responsibility for many of the policies involved.
The linkages between civil and military concerns, and between European Union and national responsibilities, in the conduct of an integrated security and crisis management policy are still being thought through. Yet the necessary institutional machinery is starting to take shape – in the Political and Security Committee, for example, and in the bodies that advise it, including the Military Committee, the Politico-Military Group and the Committee for Civilian Aspects of Crisis Management. I am working with Mr Solana to define the potential and the limits of our respective roles and responsibilities.
It is not always easy. There are unresolved questions, for example, about the financing of the common foreign and security policy, whether for actions funded out of the Community budget, or for expenditure with military or defence implications, which must always be charged to Member States. The European Union needs mechanisms that will give it greater budgetary flexibility in the conduct of foreign policy, and will enable it to deploy funds more quickly in times of crisis. We have put forward some Community budget proposals to that end. But in the search for greater flexibility we must not create parallel structures in the common foreign and security policy which escape proper parliamentary scrutiny and financial control through the Court of Auditors – or which encroach upon matters of Community competence.
These problems are not insoluble. We have agreed arrangements for the EU Policing Mission in Bosnia, for example, which tread a careful path between the competing concerns. But we must continue to proceed with sensitivity – and that applies as well in the area of defence-related industries which my colleague, Mr Liikanen, is about to address.
I should like to make one final point and I am provoked – or encouraged – to do so by the interesting remarks made by Mr Brok. Mr Brok quite understandably said that we needed to be able to demonstrate how serious we are about Europe's security. He spoke about expenditure on defence and expenditure on defence equipment. These are extremely dangerous waters – shark-filled waters – for a Commissioner to seek to swim in. The Commission is not a 16th Member State; it does not have its own taxpayers responsible for electing it or discharging it. I read about the important debate as to whether Europe should spend more on precision-guided missiles, on special forces, on air-lift capacity, on military telecommunications. It seems to me that a very strong intellectual and political case is made that unless we are prepared to spend more in these areas, the consequences on the trans-Atlantic alliance in terms of the difference in technological capacity are bound, in due course, to be destabilising. But I do not want to enter any further into that debate, I just want to make one very important, realistic point.
The President of the United States has just asked for a 14% increase in defence spending – an increase of USD 48 billion in the United States defence budget. I would like to know whether there is anybody in this Parliament who is a member of a political party which would be able to get elected, advocating in Europe a 14% increase in defence spending, while at the same time health and education spending are cut. Hands up!
I just want to make the point that we should be realistic. We should not allow the gap between our rhetoric and what we are actually prepared to argue for as politicians to open up too widely. And we should recognise the extremely important contribution we make to all those other aspects of security which, for example, we were talking about at Monterrey a few weeks ago under the aegis of the United Nations. It is not irrelevant to security to engage at the moment in what some people rather sneeringly call social work in Afghanistan. If social work in Afghanistan makes it unnecessary for us to be militarily involved in Afghanistan again in five or ten years' time, then that seems to be to be a very good investment in the security of the European Union and the region and the world.
I hope we can be realistic in our assessments of security and realistic about the best ways in which Europe can actually contribute to greater security around the world, with the wholehearted endorsement of those who vote for you, if not for me.
As you said, Mr President, my colleague Mr Liikanen will intervene in a moment on defence trade and production issues but let me say something about the Commission’s overall approach to security and defence.
I start from the extremely strong conviction that it is not possible to divide foreign policy neatly into civil matters on the one hand, and military and defence issues on the other, as if they were unrelated and as if they could be handled without reference to one another. The European Security and Defence Policy is an integral part of the common foreign and security policy. The Treaty requires that the Commission should be fully associated with that policy. The Commission has no direct role in military aspects, which are themselves limited by the Treaty to the so-called Petersberg tasks. But in practice our full association with the common foreign and security policy means that we are closely involved in the policy as a whole.
That is as it should be – because a coherent overall European security, conflict prevention and crisis management policy is bound to embrace both civil and military matters, and this is a point to which I want to return at the end of my remarks.
The European Union has international relationships and programmes in many fields covering, for example, energy, environment, economic cooperation, human rights, justice and home affairs, external assistance programmes and so on. It may be that, in a crisis, initiatives are taken which also involve military deployments, or have other defence implications. But in that case the military element is one strand in what must be a seamless and integrated European policy towards the country or region in question.
Take the example of the Western Balkans which we have debated so often in this Chamber. After a long period of bloodshed and inter-ethnic strife culminating in the successful military campaign to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the European Union launched a concerted effort to restore stability and to bring about thoroughgoing political and economic reform in the region. We have created a framework of Stabilisation and Association Agreements to encourage regional integration and to give these countries a long-term political perspective of European Union membership. We are managing a key part of the UN Mission in Kosovo. We also took initiatives such as the Energy for Democracy programme in Serbia, which had explicitly political, as well as economic and humanitarian objectives.
All these have been elements – and important elements – of an integrated European security and conflict prevention policy in the region. The European Commission continues to play a central part in the conception and execution of that policy. But the EU’s policy in the region has also involved military deployments – for example in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, where NATO deployed overwhelmingly European forces in support of a political settlement at a time of rising inter-ethnic tension and violence. The deployment had to be closely co-ordinated with what the European Union was already doing. Mr Solana and I were directly involved in mediation at the time the force went in, as Parliament knows. The Commission supported the political purposes of the military deployment through its Rapid Reaction Mechanism, helping to restore confidence in the region and to reduce inter-ethnic tension through an emergency house-reconstruction programme and through other measures.
Now, at the European Council in Barcelona, heads of government have expressed the European Union’s availability to take responsibility for a follow-on military operation, if certain conditions can be fulfilled, including permanent arrangements on European Union-NATO cooperation. The Commission is not directly involved in that decision, which touches upon the physical security of national military personnel deployed in the region – nor do we seek direct involvement. But, again, we must be associated in so far as this will add value to the European Union’s overall effort. We need to be able to make our voice heard because, as I have said, military decisions also have implications for the European Union's comprehensive security policy in the wider sense, as I have described it.
The linkages between defence and military aspects of CFSP, and the more traditional areas of Community concern, are complex and often politically sensitive. The European Commission stands ready to play its part in using the potential of the Treaty to help to develop a strong, efficient and viable European armaments industry. It is clear from the motions before us today that this is as the European Parliament would wish. Most Members of this House, for example, would support the Commission’s initiative to launch the Advisory Group on Aerospace – or STAR 21 as it is known – to consider the strategic challenges faced by the European Union in that crucial sector. We welcome the participation in that Group of Carlos Westendorp, Chairman of the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy, and of Karl von Wogau."@en1
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