Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-15-Speech-3-028"
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"en.20020515.2.3-028"2
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". – Mr President, it is exactly a year since I presented to this Parliament the Commission’s Communication on Reinforcing the Transatlantic Relationship.
It helps, in that context, to take a balanced view of events. For example, our disagreements on trade sometimes seem to overshadow our relationship. Europe and the US are the largest trading partners. Our conflicts account for a fraction of total our trade. The trade flow increases, but the number of disputes does not.
Too little attention is paid to the close cooperation we enjoy in protecting and developing the international trading system. EU-US cooperation was crucial to the success of Doha in launching a new WTO Round focused on growth in developing countries. Our cooperation to help developing countries has gone beyond trade; we have both substantially increased development assistance; we have agreed on a financing for development strategy in the "Monterrey Consensus"; we are now working very closely in preparation for the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development. I hope we can cooperate as well there, too.
I will not repeat Pascal Lamy’s recent words in this Chamber on trade issues, but would only like to remind the House that the Transatlantic Economic Partnership (TEP) framework has continued to do what was set up to achieve. The partnership aims at preventing disputes from escalating and at accelerating activity in areas of mutual interest. These are precisely the results of our recent cooperation, in particular: first, the launching of a Positive Economic Agenda; second, the reasonable management and prevention of disputes in the framework of the Early Warning Mechanism (recent cases include Spanish clementines and hushkits); third, a firm commitment at the highest level in the US on the necessary compliance with the WTO decision on Foreign Sales Corporations (FSCs).
It is worth keeping these points in mind – while not glossing over our profound disagreements on issues like steel and our new concerns about the impact of the New Farm Bill. I can assure Parliament that we will continue to deal with the steel dispute and other disagreements entirely according to the WTO rules and procedures. We do not intend to lose the high ground on these issues.
I do not believe, against this background, that the appalling events of last autumn call for an entirely new framework for Transatlantic Dialogue and Cooperation. The 1995 New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA) is still valid. It has given us a strategy for the broadening of our relationship, which generally has been very successful.
What has been lacking is a strategy to make our cooperation as results-oriented as we would like it to be. To establish such a strategy and to streamline an overly bureaucratic process was the objective of last year’s communication. The approach we suggested, which aimed at more stringent priority-setting, was endorsed not only by Member States, but also by our US counterparts. I might add that – ironically, perhaps – counter-terrorism was one of the priorities identified at last year’s Summit. This is not a structure set in stone, the priorities are reviewed on a regular basis, and it does not limit the overall scope of our dialogue. The Positive Economic Agenda, which was agreed at the Summit in Washington early this month, is another good example of this approach.
The report before us calls for the transatlantic dialogues to be strengthened and for a greater involvement for the European Parliament and the US Congress in the NTA process. I am a strong believer in the role of Parliament and of civil society. The Commission has been supporting the transatlantic dialogues and listening to their recommendations. We are discussing with our US colleagues how to re-launch the Transatlantic Environment Dialogue and how to give greater impetus to the Consumer and Business Dialogues.
We have been working closely with the European Parliament in the past and will continue to do so. The Transatlantic Legislators’ Dialogue and the inter-parliamentary meetings are important instruments and I would certainly encourage greater use of them.I will not add to the very full report on the recent EU/US summit by the presidency, save to note with pleasure that President Bush promised to seek the necessary changes to US legislation to comply with the WTO ruling on Foreign Sales Corporation. And I emphasise once again that we were able to focus some discussion on those areas, like the Balkans, like the Middle East, like Afghanistan, where we are working very closely together to produce a safer world.
Let me make one final point. Occasionally, when an important relationship in international affairs hits a few problems, the reaction of critics is to say that what is required is a new vision or a new strategy. I have to say that I do not think that the problems we face in managing the European-American relationship result from a lack of vision. We have a pretty clear vision that we are better off on both sides of the Atlantic, and the world is safer and more prosperous, when we cooperate and give the international community a clear lead in confronting the challenges of a new century. There are always likely to be problems, even in an important partnership, when national interests collide. National interest has not simply been erased in today’s world. But those differences will be magnified if we start to disagree too frequently about how "national" the national interest really is. It is our profound judgment in Europe, the product of our history and experience, and not of some flabby prejudice, that the national interest is invariably pursued best through international cooperation, and we should not be ashamed to make that point loudly and clearly.
One last point: Mr Elles has done a great deal to promote, to deepen our transatlantic dialogue and our transatlantic relationship. But I see from him an amendment on the order paper which causes, I am bound to say, and I am not a notoriously thin-skinned old hack, a slight
in the Commissioner for External Relations. The honourable Member deplores the absence of strategic thinking from the Commission.
Few could have imagined then the horror of the terrorist attacks on the United States of 11 September , which have dominated international affairs and have greatly influenced the relationship between the United States and the European Union ever since. Those attacks brought home the vulnerability of open and democratic societies. But they also strongly underlined their enduring strength. The attacks demonstrated the extent to which Europe and America are united by the values we share, as the scale of the outpouring of grief and sympathy in European countries in the weeks after 11 September made very clear.
The honourable Member's profundity as a strategist may be greater than mine and it may even be greater than Dr Kissinger's
but I just want to say one thing to him: the steel dispute with the United States is not a result of a lack of strategic thinking on the part of the European Commission. The lack of agreement on the Kyoto protocol is not the result of a lack of strategic thinking on the part of the European Commission. The Farm Bill, and I direct the honourable Member's attention to this current edition of the Economist magazine, is not a result of a lack of strategic thinking on the part of the Commission. The biological weapons disagreement; the disagreement over small arms; the disagreement over the International Criminal Court are not a result of a lack of strategic thinking on the part of the Commission.
Let me say something else. The view which is very strongly felt in the United States that Europe does not do enough to defend itself, it does not spend enough on its own security – that is not a result of a lack of strategic thinking on the part of the Commission. I stood here in this Parliament a few weeks ago and asked whether there was anybody in the Chamber who would tell me that their political party would fight an election, pledged to the sort of increase in defence spending that President Bush recently announced. Even the party to which Mr Elles and I are proud to belong would not commit itself to that. It is no problem of the European Commission's making.
Where I agree passionately with the honourable Member, is that the relationship between the European Union and the United States matters profoundly. I deplore, as he does, anti-Americanism. I deplore, as he does, those who seek to define their Europeanness in terms of how hostile they are to the United States. If Mr Elles would like to see a development of that argument, I commend to him next Saturday's edition of the Guardian and the review by the Commissioner for External Relations of a recent book by Will Hutton. I equally deplore the mirror image of that: the visceral contempt that one sometimes reads about and hears expressed in the United States about Europe.
The relationship between the European Union and the United States is of enormous importance to the future of the world. Maybe some would argue that geostrategically the relationship between China and the United States is going to be more important in this century – over a fifth of humanity and the world's leading power – but our relationship is also important. What makes the relationship so difficult is that we are not just dealing with a superpower, we are dealing with what a recent US ambassador to London, Ray Seitz, has called a "super duper power". A "super duper power" which was responsible for 40% of the world's growth between 1995 and 2000.
For all of us, managing this relationship with the world's greatest power is going to be enormously important. I do not think that we, in the Commission, show an absence of strategic thinking in considering the importance of that relationship. But the problem is today that there are rather too many issues on which we disagree, and we want to work to reduce them and ensure that where we do disagree, we in the European Union can fulfil our responsibilities of international leadership without that aggravating our relationship with our friends in the United States.
Europe has displayed practical support as well as emotional solidarity. Our cooperation with the US in the months after 11 September in the campaign against terrorism testifies to that. We have made significant progress in the field of police and judicial cooperation – through the US/Europol agreement signed last September, the mandate for a US/Europol data protection agreement and for a mutual assistance/extradition agreement, and through the decision to adopt a European arrest warrant. We have worked together to strengthen border controls, and we have made progress within the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the International Maritime Organisation to strengthen aviation and maritime security. We have worked together to seize terrorist assets. The European Union has played a full part in stitching together the coalition against terrorism. European troops are heavily engaged in Afghanistan, both as the largest component of the International Security Assistance Force, as well as in combat operations. And the European Union is making a formidable contribution towards the reconstruction of Afghanistan, which I am looking forward to seeing myself when I visit that country next week.
On all these matters, we are working closely with the United States, and to good effect. We are showing how much we can achieve when we operate together with each other, and in partnership with other nations.
We are doing so too in the Balkans and, more recently, within the so-called Quartet to try to seek a peaceful solution in the Middle East.
All of that demonstrates that the world is a safer and better place when the European Union and the world’s most formidable power work in harmony.
But, as honourable Members are well aware, there has been for some time in Washington a debate about whether the US – now so powerful – should focus on its own rather narrowly defined interests, the so-called unilateralist approach, or whether it should continue to give a lead to multilateralist efforts, at the head of the international community’s concerted drive to deal with common problems. This is not a new debate, though it has perhaps grown in intensity. I only want to say this about a debate whose existence is not an exaggerated figment of our European imagination. Europe will necessarily be on the multilateralist side in this debate. That is in the nature of how we see the world and of our experience. No one has to apologise for that. But when we disagree over what seem to us to be unilateralist policies, what is the correct European approach?
Not to keep quiet, in my opinion. But, equally, not to stand around on the sidelines whingeing. Where we disagree with the US – for example on their decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol – we should take the lead ourselves and press ahead with ratification, encouraging others to do so as well. Similarly, we are opposed to the recent US decision on the International Criminal Court. But opposition is not enough, we will work hard to make the court a success.
I hope that we will not get the disagreements out of proportion and that we can move to a relationship in which we are better able to celebrate the considerable areas in which the EU and the United States are working as one, and to find better ways both to manage our disagreements, and, where we fetch up agreeing to disagree, to do so in as sensible and as reasonable a manner as possible."@en1
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