Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-22-Speech-3-109"
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"en.20031022.5.3-109"2
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"Mr President, following the collapse of Communist dictatorships in the former Eastern bloc, the world has not exactly become a safer place. As Samuel Huntington has pointed out, we progressed, after the Cold War, from a bipolar to a multipolar world, and more than ever before, what matters is to identify friend and foe and, hence, also the threats that face us. As has rightly been pointed out, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and badly governed states are Europe's three most important threats. I should also like to add the demographic pressure of an uncontrollable and encroaching Islam to this list. Europe must therefore provide an efficient and well-developed security and defence system. This will require political will, as well as investments. In that respect, we have to conclude with some sense of shame that the average outgoings for each soldier in Belgium are three times lower than in the other European Member States. The Belgian Government has already announced that it will not be increasing the defence budget during this term in office, which has, in fact, only just started. It is therefore a sign of some hypocrisy on the part of the Belgian Government if it wants to take the lead in the development of a defence system at European level on the one hand, while refusing to accept the consequences and obligations that this entails."@en1
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