Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-06-Speech-3-040"
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Mr President, I wish to say, for the second time this morning, what an honour it is to address the European Parliament. I greatly value the dialogue I have had with Parliament and its committees, not just over the last four years as Britain’s Foreign Minister but over the previous four years as Britain’s Home Secretary. Indeed, I have been serving in the British Government long enough to recall our previous Presidency, seven and a half years ago, when I had the privilege of chairing the Justice and Home Affairs Council.
Nelson Mandela said: ‘Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings’. Mandela was right. Africa has all too many examples of how the actions of human beings prevent other human beings from building better lives for themselves.
In Darfur – as Hilary Benn, my colleague and friend, the Secretary of State for International Development in the United Kingdom – and I have both seen for ourselves, the government-backed militia has killed many thousands of people. Millions have had to flee their homes.
In Zimbabwe, the government has already trampled over democracy and basic human rights and has ruined an economy that was once amongst the strongest in the whole of Africa. The government in Zimbabwe has now turned on the poorest and the most vulnerable in that country, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes and destroying their livelihoods. The problem of Zimbabwe is not one of intrinsic lack of resources or of climate but one of very bad governance. The European Union has been right to send a firm message that the government of Zimbabwe’s behaviour is wholly unacceptable. We have done so through new extended and restrictive measures against the Mugabe regime, and through a firm condemnation of the latest abuses.
But amongst all this gloom, let us remember that the picture in Africa is far more complex than it at first appears. In the 1970s you could count the democracies of Africa on the fingers of one hand and still have two fingers left: there were three. Today there are more than thirty democratically elected governments across the continent.
Only a few years ago, armed conflicts were ablaze across Africa, but today sustainable peace is taking root in countries such as Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola. The Organisation of African Unity used to preach non-interference in its members’ internal affairs. In contrast, its successor, the new African Union, is founded not on non-interference but on non-indifference. It is taking as its inspiration what the European Union has been able to achieve in a continent that was once itself characterised not by the peace and stability we now enjoy, but by conflict, war and bloodshed.
Through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, NEPAD, African leaders have agreed to a peer review mechanism which many developed world governments, many governments in Europe, would find uncomfortably intrusive. Nor is the economic situation in Africa as uniformly negative as it sometimes seems. Some countries, such as Mozambique and Ethiopia, have achieved growth rates of around 7%, a level sufficient to lift large numbers of people out of poverty.
The continent has enormous resources, both physical and human, and these positive factors should give us real cause for hope. Africans want a better future and we in Europe, with our international partners, must continue to deliver the support to enable reform in Africa to take root and in turn help Africans to change the situation for the better.
So we have made this year a year of action and we have already achieved a great deal. Last month’s European Council is currently famous for its disagreements on the European Union budget, but I suggest that our children will better remember it as the Council which decided to double European aid to Africa over the next five years. That was the enduring legacy of that Council and, with luck and work, the temporary problems over the European budget will indeed be temporary.
We are also resolved to make that aid better coordinated and more effective, building on the agreements made at the OECD meeting in Paris this spring. We have to ensure that the aid does not compound bad governance and enrich the corrupt, but rather that it is used to drive up standards of governance and help the poorest, for whom it is intended.
The G8 has agreed 100% debt relief for all highly indebted poor countries and the G8 leaders who assemble today in Gleneagles and meet today and tomorrow will discuss further support. At the United Nations Summit in September, we are going to review the Millennium Development Goals and strengthen international action to achieve them. However, we have to do more. Under our Presidency, the United Kingdom will work to deliver a European strategy to support Africa’s successful development. The strategy needs to be comprehensive and ambitious; it should go beyond financial support and show how Africa will invest in people, in good governance, in growth, peace and security. As part of this strategy, we have to deliver better access to developed markets for the world’s poorest countries, so as to make the Doha development agenda a reality, and we should start with this December’s meeting in Hong Kong.
I also wish to congratulate Parliament on its initiative today to support the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign. It is a sign of your strong commitment to global development in what is a vital year for Africa and for the poorest nations worldwide.
The European Union, the United States and other rich countries must honour their commitments to abolish export subsidies and do so to a clear and explicit timetable. We have to recognise, too, the central importance of peace and stability in Africa. Already there are thousands of refugees in Darfur who are safer. Why? Thanks to financing from the European Union Peace Facility for the African Union’s mission there. Through the facility, we can increase our support further by supporting the African Union and organisations like the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, which itself has played such an important role in tackling conflict in West Africa.
The Peace Facility really has been a success, but the money allocated to it is running out and we need to agree adequate long-term funding for it. As Africa’s leaders themselves have recognised, Europe can help by promoting better and more democratic governance in Africa.
To return to the issue of Zimbabwe, I greatly welcome the European Parliament’s calls for action on elections and rigorous enforcement of European Union sanctions. The Joint EU-ACP Parliamentary Assembly has been a strong supporter of better governance in African states, as well as those in the Caribbean and Pacific. The Cotonou Agreement allows us to suspend aid in the worst cases. We should not only remain prepared to use that provision but, I suggest, be far more proactive in monitoring progress on democracy and on governance. It is the people who have most to gain from democracy and better governance, the ordinary people in the ACP countries in Africa, who themselves are wanting us to make use of these mechanisms within agreements like the Cotonou Agreement.
The great Live 8 concerts that took place across Europe and across the globe last weekend are still echoing in our ears. They and the wider interest generated by the G8 Gleneagles meeting have hugely raised expectations in Africa and in Europe and across the developed world that this time the aid effort to Africa will work. Let us hope that it will. Let us hope that the developed nations actually deliver the aid they are promising, but let us also understand this: the process will only work if governance in Africa is improved and corruption there is cut down.
In our action in Africa and across the world, the European Union can draw on three great strengths. Firstly, the EU’s intrinsic power and influence. When we speak together we can set the international agenda. We are doing so on world trade, but I have seen that too in leading with Javier Solana, with Joschka Fischer and now with Philippe Douste-Blazy in the difficult Iran dossier. The strength of the European Union when it is united is phenomenal. The strength we have is the strength of our global connections. There is hardly a country anywhere in the world that does not have some special tie of history or friendship with one or other of the European Union’s Member States. The latest enlargement, last May, added further to that network of partnership and trust and our global reach is mirrored in this Parliament and in your strong international engagement.
The EU is today building stronger relationships with neighbours such as Russia and new strategic partners such as China and India, which are going to hold such important summits with the EU during our Presidency. Obviously we will wield greater influence with such strategic partners when we act together.
The third, and perhaps most important, strength is the strength of the European Union’s values. Soft power in foreign policy has been defined as making others want what we want. The European Union’s enlargement is one of the most striking and powerful examples of that soft power in action. The magnetic pull of the EU’s success, its values and institutions, have helped to transform first southern, then central and eastern Europe and the prospect of EU membership is now spreading reform and stability to Turkey and across the Western Balkans.
Others here perhaps know the Western Balkans better than I do, but all of us who know the Western Balkans know that in reality the only thing that is helping to push those divided communities towards some prospect of peace and security is the European Union, its values and its strength. The June European Union Council recognised this in reaffirming its intention that the EU should fully implement its existing commitments on enlargement, including opening negotiations with Turkey on 3 October.
Meanwhile, our neighbourhood policy is helping to promote our values further to the east and to the south, including to Ukraine and to the Mediterranean countries, with which we will also host summits during the UK Presidency. Those values are the bedrock of the transatlantic relationship, the world’s greatest alliances of liberal democracies, essential in tackling the global challenges of the future from terrorism and proliferation to poverty and climate change.
Through these assets – our own strength, our global connections and the power of our values – the European Union today has even greater potential to increase its strength as a force for good across the world. I look forward to working with you all towards that goal during our Presidency.
Mrs Morgantini has submitted to me some detailed questions. I have already sent her a detailed answer to those questions and I shall make sure they are more widely available. In my speech I shall be answering many of the points she raised.
Over the last few months, the headlines in Europe have often been about disagreement and difficulty. The voters in two founder Member States have brought into sharp relief questions of profound concern to all Europe’s citizens. How can the European Union better deliver to them the prosperity and security which we all seek in a rapidly changing world?
Some of the answers to that question will concern the European Union’s internal policies, including future financing. The United Kingdom, as Tony Blair said to Parliament just two weeks ago, takes its responsibilities as EU President very seriously. We will work hard to reach agreement on the Financial Perspective by the end of the year. Alongside this, we will seek to conduct the wider debate on Europe’s future direction and priorities in an open and inclusive way, respectful of the different viewpoints in this Parliament and amongst Europe’s governments and citizens. Yet if we are to respond fully to people’s hopes and fears for the future, it is just as important that the EU strengthen its actions in the wider world. One of the most striking developments of the last few years has been how much we have done already in the European Union to rise to that challenge, on a basis of very broad agreement.
A few years ago, Europe’s nations were severely divided, as we were reminded in the previous debate over Iraq. Yet today we are taking strong common action in support of peace in the Middle East, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We have a comprehensive programme of engagement with the new Iraq. We are leading the international community in the difficult but vital process of engagement with Iran.
The story is the same on security and defence. Just a few years ago the debate on ESDP revolved around the location and staffing of a small planning cell in a suburb of Brussels. But today an EU force is working with NATO in Bosnia on the ground. EU missions there and in Macedonia are training police. We are also training Iraqi police and judiciary. We have two European missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We are assisting the African Union force in Sudan.
So, today, the European Security and Defence Policy is not a piece of paper: it is making a real difference to thousands of lives across the globe. I want the United Kingdom’s Presidency – and the years ahead – to be a time in which we build on these achievements and further strengthen the European Union’s influence and power as a force for good in the world. Nowhere is that more important than in Africa. Africa today is poorer than it was 25 years ago. Half of the population south of the Sahara lives on less than a dollar a day. Africa’s share of world trade is one third of its level in 1980. The total national income of sub-Saharan African countries is less than the developed world – the EU, the United States, Japan and a few other countries – spend on farming subsidies. A major breakthrough is needed if we are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. At the current pace, it will take Sub-Saharan Africa more than 100 years to meet the targets for primary education or reducing infant mortality. For three of the goals – those for hunger, poverty and sanitation – the situation in sub-Saharan Africa is getting worse day by day.
Meanwhile, life expectancy in Africa today is just 42, less than the age of most people in this Chamber. It is predicted that in some African countries life expectancy will be under 30 in five years’ time. Twenty million Africans have already died of AIDS, now the continent’s biggest killer. Three-quarters of those living with HIV worldwide are in Africa."@en1
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