Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-10-Speech-1-056"
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Mr President, services are one of the new areas of international trade that directly concern social preference and lifestyle and that, therefore, more than goods, are a source of concern to the citizens and their representatives. These concerns relate, in particular, to the transparency of international negotiations, preserving our public services and behaviour towards developing countries, if I am to go by the questions raised by a number of you. They are, moreover, reflected in the motions for resolutions tabled before this House. Before I present to you the European Union’s offers for opening up the services markets, I would briefly like to remind you what these negotiations involve.
Fourth principle: kingly services are excluded from the scope of the discussion. The General Agreement on Trade in Services does not cover services that are not provided on a commercial basis or in competition with other service providers. It is only when the States choose to subject their public services to market rules, therefore, that they become subject to the rules of this market and can enter the negotiations.
Fifth and final principle: with regard to major services of public interest – education, health, culture, water, energy and public transport – each country is free to choose between various formulas. They can organise the service as a public or private monopoly. They can open up the services market to competing suppliers but restrict access to national companies. They could also, for example, open up the services market to national and foreign suppliers, but without entering into any multilateral GATS commitment. Lastly, they can, for example, enter into GATS commitments relating to the right of foreign companies to supply services in addition to national suppliers, but have the choice of whether or not to grant them full national treatment. In any case, liberalisation, once accepted, only affects non-discrimination and in no way involves giving up regulatory power.
The General Agreement on Services does not, therefore, affect the definition of public service missions, their organisation or their funding. From this point of view, the member States of the WTO retain all their freedom. We consider these protective barriers to be the best guarantees for Europe to be able to continue to develop its own model of services of public interest while still benefiting from the advantages relating to opening up trade in services. This is a more effective way of preserving the European model than excluding services of public interest from the scope of the General Agreement on Trade in Services, a suggestion which I have often had cause to debate. I believe that such exclusion would be counterproductive, as it would lead to the multilateral definition of a comprehensive list of services considered to be of public interest and would open a multilateral debate on the desirable content of this list, a subject on which each Member State of the WTO might have a different view. I feel that, ultimately, we would run the risk of ending up with a more limited list than the Union itself would wish for.
I shall now come to the negotiations themselves. What are our objectives? Eliminating or reducing a number of barriers to access to several sectors where the Union has world-class companies – telecoms, business services, professional services, financial services, construction, distribution, transport, energy and tourism. In order to be able to achieve these proactive objectives, the Union must present a substantial offer.
Naturally, our requests and offers are not just improvisation. They are the conversion into specific negotiation documents of political guidelines that were drawn up in December 2000, following discussions with the other European institutions – the Council and Parliament. Since then, the documents that set out our approach to the negotiations have been widely published, in particular on our website.
The requests made of the WTO partners, which were tabled last July, cover a number of sectors which have been made public. I may come back to them later. I would specify that these requests do not seek to dismantle public services or privatise public companies. No request has been made to any country by the Union with regard to health services or audiovisual services, and only the United States has received a request from us, restricted to privately funded higher education.
As regards the offers, we at the Commission sent the proposed offer to the Council and to Parliament at the beginning of February, trying to respond to the requests of both developed countries and developing countries, with particular emphasis on the requests made to us by developing countries. In terms of sectors, we propose to respond to the requests we have received on financial services, information technology services, telecoms, transport, distribution, postal and courier services, professional services and tourism. In so doing, we would like to make a particular effort to take account of the requests of developing countries by proposing to improve the Union’s commitments in terms of the temporary movement of persons. This offer was designed to safeguard public services fully within the Union, and I shall come back to that before concluding. No new commitments have been proposed in the fields of education and health, and we are not proposing any commitments in the field of audiovisual services. I shall come back to that with my colleague, Mrs Reding.
The Commission’s work has mainly been inspired by the comments received in response to a public consultation that began at the end of last autumn. I would specify that the details of our proposed offer are still confidential at present, so that the Member States have the necessary room for negotiation and those of you with access to the details of this offer can work on it. I know and I am well aware that the restricted classification under which this text was sent to you does not fully satisfy you, or in any case some of you, and that is why we have done our best to contribute to an informed parliamentary debate. Today’s sitting is proof of this, in addition to the appearances I have also made before the committee to which I report.
One last point on this matter of transparency: I have decided to make all our proposals public once they have been finalised. The European Union will be the first member of the World Trade Organisation to take this step. I did this in response to a number of requests, including, moreover, a significant number from this House. I did not do it with regard to the requests addressed to third countries. Indeed, if I were to make these requests public, a number of our partners in the negotiations would view this publicity as an attempt to put pressure on them, which would not be good for our negotiating position.
A quick word about two sectors for which the current proposal does not contain an offer. First of all, energy services. We are not proposing any improvement in our commitments at this stage, pending completion of the work underway within the WTO on the classification of energy services within the scope of the Agreement on Services.
First of all, let us recall the spirit in which the Union is conducting these negotiations: we need to pursue our economic interests proactively while also defending our European social model and enabling developing countries to integrate more fully into the world economy. It is that balance which has inspired the Commission’s proposals.
At this stage, we are not proposing any commitments with regard to trade in water collection, purification and distribution either, both because we have only received one request in this sector, and because we would also like to clarify with our WTO partners what exactly the provision of services covers in this sector. Having said that, this is a field in which we have significant active interests, and some of our Member States have already pointed this out to us.
One last point before I talk about cultural diversity and the audiovisual sector: we are currently at the offer stage. It is the beginning of the negotiations and our opening offer would, of course, only become a commitment if, during the negotiations, others were also prepared to improve access to their services market for our European operators.
Lastly, let us talk about trade in cultural and audiovisual services and about cultural diversity. Culture and, more specifically, the audiovisual sector, are not excluded from the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Quite simply, at the end of the Uruguay Round, the Union fully preserved its current and future freedom of manoeuvre by not making any commitments in terms of market access or national treatment in this sector. Furthermore, at the time, we kept a long list of exemptions from the most-favoured-nation clause which allows us to discriminate between third countries with regard to the treatment given, within the Union, to their audiovisual works. It is this freedom of manoeuvre that we used commonly to call ‘cultural exception’ and which has been renamed ‘preservation of cultural diversity’.
The Commission’s mandate for the negotiations underway consists of preserving political requests in terms of preserving and promoting cultural diversity. Entirely naturally, we are therefore sticking to our mandate and are not proposing any commitments in the field of audiovisual services in these negotiations. As the promotion of cultural diversity is included in the EC Treaty, it naturally forms part of our trade policy. Some WTO Member States have already made known their expectations in the audiovisual sector. These include the United States, Brazil and Japan. Others, such as India, have also announced active interests without, however, having tabled specific requests. It is therefore clear to us that developed countries and developing countries share the same interests and we must – and this is the position Mrs Reding and I want to put to you today – be fully aware that the promotion of cultural diversity cannot be reduced to the defence by each Member State of its own national industry. This is not about creating a new form of disguised protectionism which would not convince anyone. We believe we could convince countries, in particular the developing countries, more effectively of the legitimacy of our argument if we were able to show our genuine openness to diversity and, to that end, we need a proactive approach. The defensive role in this matter is my responsibility. My colleague, Mrs Reding, is responsible for the proactive part and will now update you on our progress.
In order to clear up certain misunderstandings, let us also recall that our objectives with regard to opening up trade in services are completely unrelated to the liberalisation that seems to be taking place left, right and centre. What we are discussing is a combination of market access and rules. The two cannot be separated if we want to achieve our objectives in these international negotiations, which are to reinvigorate growth, integrate the developing countries into world trade and ensure that, in opening up the markets, we respect the various preferences and values of our societies.
We at the Commission believe that negotiations on services are in the interests of both the industrialised countries and the developing countries, for several reasons. First of all, from a general perspective, we can no longer separate trade in goods from trade in services. Without access to the high-quality systems provided by insurance, banking, accountancy services, telecommunications, transport and distribution, an economy is no longer competitive today. This applies equally to developed countries and developing countries. Secondly, the European Union has a great deal to gain from these negotiations. Services are the most dynamic sector of the European economy. They represent two-thirds of our gross domestic product and jobs. Lastly, services are often the Achilles’ heel of many developing countries whose export capacity is restricted by low productivity levels and the lack of competition in their service industries. Most of these countries, furthermore, are well aware of this, as is shown by the fact that more than half of the requests received by the Union relating to opening up trade in services come precisely from developing countries: Kenya, India, Mali, Gambia, Egypt, Mauritius and Brazil, amongst others.
Do these arguments therefore point to a need for the full liberalisation, or even deregulation or privatisation, of services? Certainly not: a significant number of services are already the subject of trade which is, quite rightly, strictly regulated, and encouragement given to trade in services must respect this regulatory framework which was established by the competent public authorities. That is why, in our opinion, the Union was right to choose the WTO as the main framework for opening up the services markets. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, multilateral negotiations provide greater transparency and better conduct on the part of States since they are based on clear rules which are familiar to and accepted by all participants in the negotiations. Without organisation of trade at a world level, negotiations on services would take place on an entirely bilateral basis with no common rules of play, which would undoubtedly lead to pressure on the developing countries. From this perspective, the World Trade Organisation, which is a multilateral organisation if ever there was one, is thus a useful and necessary safeguard against uncontrolled liberalisation.
This framework having been established, the negotiations conform to certain principles that should be broadly recalled before this House, so that the debate is based on clear, accurate facts.
First principle: the negotiations concern trade in services and not the way in which it is regulated in each country. The States retain the freedom to impose any rules they wish and to entrust the management of these services to public or private undertakings. The WTO negotiations have no direct or indirect connection with the decisions on privatisation that particular States might take.
Second principle: each country is free to determine which sectors it intends to open up to international competition and which it wishes to keep closed. I would remind you that, in the WTO, decisions are taken by consensus, with each State having one vote. Agreement is not possible without the consent of the developing countries, in particular, the most advanced of which, such as China, India and Brazil, are fully able to make themselves heard.
Third principle: there is no sectoral reciprocity in these negotiations. The United States, for example, could very well decide to open up the education sector without obliging other States to follow suit in the negotiations."@en1
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