Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-22-Speech-3-111"
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"en.20031022.5.3-111"2
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"Mr President, I would like to thank Mr Brok for his balanced approach, which has now become legendary. His report bears witness to how much the world situation has changed since last year. At that time, terrorist attacks were uppermost in our minds, whereas now the focus is on the invasion of Iraq. The rapporteur reminds us of the chasms that have been thrown up between the Member States of the European Union, which have severely strained transatlantic relations and which have affected different NATO members to varying degrees.
Mr Brok believes that it is, however, now necessary to redefine Europe's role and, perhaps, to take advantage of the political crisis sparked by the war to make the Union a credible and powerful political actor on the foreign policy stage. Of course, the means of achieving this objective are still relatively ill-defined: some new Member States and their neighbours have, yet again, discovered America and its promises of political and economic guarantees. For this reason, it is advisable not to forget Member States' duty to refrain from intervening in international affairs on the basis of unilateral national positions until the European Union has had an opportunity to define a common European position.
I do not, of course, have time to go into all this in greater depth, but the future of our foreign policy is linked to the European Constitution; the veto can wreck the most ambitious peace plans, as we have heard this morning. The European Union's common foreign and security policy objectives depend, not least, on its ability to equip itself with military resources, with the result that we can only envisage relatively low-cost operations. Perhaps we shall have to content ourselves with that, even though, ultimately, I do not believe we can. The Franco-German Brigade alone, a core Rapid Reaction Force, might well have been enough to stop the Balkan crisis in 1991, as Mr Frattini has also said today. We must insist: in addition to the small steps forward achieved …"@en1
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