Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-12-Speech-3-172"
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"en.20050112.9.3-172"2
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"Mr President, concern is sometimes voiced that aid measures for victims are becoming a strange kind of competition between individual countries and organisations, and that all that matters is who gives the most. A belief that certain interests, and not always innocent ones, are trying to profit from this aid, or in other words that this aid is not in fact unselfish, but that it serves a particular purpose, is also occasionally behind these concerns.
Yet I do not share such concerns in the face of an act of solidarity on such an unprecedented international scale. On the contrary, I would be more than happy to see nothing but solidarity in our conflict-filled world, and nothing but solidarity of this kind, not hostile or violent solidarity aimed at pitting the strongest against the weakest.
There are at least two issues to which we must turn our attention, however. The first is the following question: why are the financial contributions of individual countries noted so scrupulously in lists of aid donated? Why do we refer to the contributions made by Germany, France or Sweden, and not the to contribution made by the European Community? We are Europeans, after all. We stress this fact at every given opportunity, yet unfortunately as soon as money is involved, nationalist sentiments come to the fore.
The second question relates not to the principles according to which aid is granted, but to the way it is organised. The tragedy in Asia has made us painfully aware that, just as we need a central headquarters where military actions are coordinated in times of war, we need a central headquarters where aid can be coordinated whenever disasters occur on a scale such as that in Asia. We are all aware that we live in a divided world, and that we will not succeed in setting up such an institute at a global level, but we must set up a rapid reaction centre of this kind at EU level. Voltaire called for such a thing after the earthquake in Lisbon, an event he could not accept as he claimed it defied his reason. Today we know that such events do not defy rational thinking, and this is all the more reason why we must take rational steps to counter them."@en1
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