Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-07-21-Speech-3-121"
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"en.20040721.6.3-121"2
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"Sorry, Mr President, for the confusion, but there are a lot of new people in the new Parliament. Congratulations to you on your election as Vice-President and on promptly serving as President in this important debate today. Mr Barroso, I want to focus on one subject, that being foreign and security policy. The chairman of my group has already tabled a number of questions for you, and that was one of them. We take the view that the European Commission of the future can make an important contribution to the further development of a strong European foreign policy with its own emphases. It is possible by combining the powers available to the Commission with those of the Council, and then the High Representative and the President of the Commission can of course play an important part in that. We want a more ambitious European Union. Security policy is an important component of that, and so, as we see it, it can never be a mere copy of the American model, which we would describe as military supremacy. In our understanding of these things, the European countries represent another tradition, and we advocate a broad-based security policy with a preference for civilian means, with military means always the option of last resort, and then only on the basis of decisions by the European Union. In the context of a broader security policy, we want to advocate development, support to developing countries, fair trade and tackling not only insecurity, but also its causes. We see conflict prevention as being as much a key concept as multilateralism. On that basis, the EU must dare make its own choices, whether in relation to Kyoto, to the International Criminal Court, or to dealing with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. If at all possible, this must take place in cooperation with the United States, and we do not underestimate the value of real cooperation, but, when there is no other choice, we must act alone. I now come to what might be called the heart of the debate and to what is still a live issue for us in the Group of the Party of European Socialists; the President-designate of the Commission has not been able to convince us that he too is thinking in terms of a similar autonomous role for the European Union. The overwhelming majority of the Socialist Group was opposed to the war in Iraq. It subsequently appeared that the resolution to wage it was founded upon errors or incomplete information concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or Iraq’s links with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and we can still read a lot about that from day to day in the newspapers and elsewhere. Nor was there any UN mandate, and we saw that as an important point. It has since become apparent that an immense amount of pain was involved in bringing Iraq to heel. We have also said what needed to be said about that over the past six months. Mr Barroso, as Prime Minister of Portugal, played a major role by organising and hosting a summit in the Azores, thus giving the impression that he identified himself with the Americans’ approach, which we regard as unilateralist. At no time since has he distanced himself from this. The question is whether he, on being faced with the same decision, would react in the same way, and whether that is his essential and fundamental conviction. This whole issue weighs heavily on the Group of the Party of European Socialists and will play an important part in the deliberations that we are going to conclude tonight. In dialogue with the Socialist Group, Mr Barroso drew attention to other European prime ministers who had also supported the American policy; it is of course relevant when assessing a candidate that politicians once pursued a policy, but his former fellow-prime ministers are not standing as president of the European Commission. I hope he will understand that we want a President who can at least empathise with us in our views of the security policy for the European Union."@en1
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