Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-07-Speech-3-037"
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"en.20050907.2.3-037"2
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"Mr President, today’s debate on the measures we must take together to fight terrorism and terrorists is one that I regard as crucial. I appreciate Mr Clarke’s pragmatic approach and sense of purpose when he says that we should manage to achieve a few things in the six months of his presidency of the Council with responsibility for these things. At the same time, I also very much appreciate the Commissioner’s remarks about the social context in which we should deal with the problem of Islam-inspired terrorism.
I should like to add my own comments about the partly political dimension to the fight against terrorism, because there is, in my view, an important connection between domestic and foreign policy where terrorism is concerned. The threat of terrorism we are facing is a perfect example of external and internal policy being interlaced, not only in the physical sense when individuals and groups from outside the EU enter it with terrorist intentions, but even more so because we are dealing with networks and ideas that know no borders. These ideas often explicitly deal with the relationship of Europe, or the west, with the rest of the world. Moreover, terrorists wrongly justify themselves by reference to their religion, which is also the religion of many of our fellow citizens, and this causes tensions that, in turn, force us to face a very difficult and precarious task. We cannot deal with those threats only by taking internal security measures. We will therefore also need to accommodate them in our foreign policy, and that involves more than mere cooperation with police and security services in third countries.
We must also examine our relationship with, and our policy in respect of, the countries in the Islamic world. It is time for a realism that is different from that which has determined our policy so far. In many countries, corruption and misgovernment are far more likely to bring forth radicalisation than policy itself, and we must make democratisation and the modernisation of government into our policy’s key priorities. While we share this objective with many Americans, we must also avoid the radical approach that many Americans, particularly neo-Conservatives, embrace with regard to the democratisation of the Middle East. It would be useful for Europe to examine the example of the OSCE, whether this organisation that we have developed in Europe could also function in the Middle East. Apart from that, it is vital to be consistent in our actions, both in terms of the various Member States’ policies and between what we say and what we do.
If we could help resolve the problems in that region in that way, this would also benefit the relationship between the different communities in our own community. Our foreign policy should provide us and the moderate Muslim majority with arguments in the debate with radical elements. We must translate the dialogue with the countries of the Islamic world directly into our dialogue with the Muslim communities within our own society. Only in that way can we isolate within its own faith community the small minority that thinks it can achieve something by the use of extreme violence. Our foreign policy is an essential piece in the internal security puzzle."@en1
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