Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-24-Speech-3-035"
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"en.20020424.3.3-035"2
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"Mr President, I thought that you had omitted to give me the floor and, had you done so, you would unfortunately be in breach of the rules, respect for which is something you criticise MPs in France for failing to show.
I regret that President Cox is no longer in the chair, if I may say so, as I would have liked to say to him directly – although I am sure that you will pass on my comments – that, in France, many sectors of public – and especially sovereignist – opinion believe that the positions we adopted on Monday on the outcome of the presidential elections in France are not only null and void and have no effect, but above all, they mark a very serious dereliction of the duty of impartiality that must be respected by any Parliament’s president, on the one hand, and even more so by an international rather than supranational Parliament, which has no place interfering in the political affairs of a Member State. I hope that he will come to his senses and that he will withdraw the utterly useless and scandalous remarks that he made on Monday.
With regard to the Middle East, we are struck by one thing – from a European perspective at least – which is that Europe and its Member States, bound together as they are by a false sense of European solidarity, are once again absent from the Middle East stage where the tragic events we are witnessing have been going on not just for weeks and months but for years. We do not want to hear once again, Mr President, that Europe must have a foreign policy. We heard this in 1991 during the Gulf War; we heard this mentioned again two or three years later in the affair in the Great Lakes Region of Africa; we heard this once again in relation to Bosnia, and again in relation to Kosovo. Each time, it was a pious hope and, each time a new international crisis rears its head, Europe is mute, mute because European countries are incapable of agreeing on a common approach. Europe can only speak with a single voice when it has nothing to say, and it says nothing because it is held prisoner by an extreme and dangerous concept of its unity, it prevents the nations from expressing their views. This is a serious matter, particularly for France, which would have had, were it not bound by its European handcuffs, a voice of justice, a voice of peace and a voice heard by a large number of the world’s countries. It is time for France – and I myself have been convinced of this for some years – to throw off this yoke and I do not doubt that it will do this, which is what the great majority of French people desire, in the years to come."@en1
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