Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-28-Speech-3-288"
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"en.20050928.24.3-288"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, so, what had to happen has indeed happened. There has been no real reform of the UN, and Europe will not have a seat on the Security Council, a point on which everyone is keeping quiet even though, it has to be said, it was the EU’s main hope at the summit.
One of the consequences of this failure is that the European Union, which will not have a Foreign Minister any more than it has any kind of common foreign policy, will remain a kind of international forum with no external visibility. All of this was quite obvious, despite the balanced comments just made to us by Mrs Ferrero-Waldner, who, in passing, given that she is speaking on French soil, could have spoken in French; in any event, she is not listening to me, as she is well able to do.
If the European ‘machine’ had been a bit more realistic regarding its own importance, we could have spared ourselves these long debates into the vacuum on the so-called European seat, which will be consigned to the back of the wardrobe with the deep piles of our shattered illusions. However, we must reflect on this failure nonetheless, because it should put us on our guard, as the failure of the Constitution, or the European deconstitution, did on a larger scale, regarding the narrow limits within which our ambitions must be contained. The impossibility of reforming the UN, which was predictable, and which we did indeed predict in our previous speeches on the subject, was itself written into the conditions of international activity.
The principle that governs and will always govern international life is the pre-eminence of sovereignties. While, within states, there can be legislation that applies to all and legitimate means of coercion that can make relations between people more peaceful, at international level there is no legitimate referee, nor will there ever be, whether it is an international organisation or a state that claims to have sole responsibility for peace among nations. That is because, faced with a referee State, in reality an imperial state, just as when faced with any supranational organisation, the other states will never lose sight of their own interests, their own personality and, I repeat, their sovereignty, as my colleague Mrs Goudin said.
That does not necessarily mean that the world is a jungle: it simply means that peace is based solely on the balance between nations and groups of nations and that all international law can do is marginalise the natural games of states that, however devoted they claim to be to the cause of peace, are still heartless monsters and will never stop calculating their power.
This should therefore be a lesson to us: the multilateral framework can achieve certain things where, and only where, by some miracle, the interests of the nations happen to coincide. I hope that realism will open our eyes and that we will finally be able to see the narrowness of the framework within which our actions are confined, by the very nature of things."@en1
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