Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-15-Speech-4-008"
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"en.20071115.2.4-008"2
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"Madam President, it is always very useful to be able to debate such an important issue in front of a heaving Chamber of colleagues who are agog to hear what Parliament has to say on this very important matter. I am also very grateful to the Commissioner for having laid down the ground rules and his views on how we tackle this issue.
Fragility is a condition that has many, many parents. The first of course is the process of decolonisation when the colonial powers drew arbitrary lines on maps, which cut across all sorts of internal stable civil society functions and split countries into two or three or four, irrespective of their tribes or religious factions and so on. That induced a certain amount of instability.
Then there is a natural form of instability that fragile nations now experience: countries which are prone to floods; small island states that are open to only a single economy product. There are countries which are geographically unable to sustain themselves because of the way God has blessed them with very few attributes, countries which have desertification, starting to produce mass migrations of people.
There are 26 so-called fragile states in the world as we speak and the most vulnerable people in the world are facing catastrophic consequences, not through their own fault in some cases, but sometimes through bad governance, sometimes through internal conflict, sometimes through civil wars, sometimes through genocidal dictators as we found, not many years ago, in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Now you can change a fragile state from being a fragile state to a post-fragile sustainable country, as we see happening in front of our eyes in Sierra Leone. But this requires effort; it requires commitment; it requires a long-term commitment, as the Commissioner said, to that country’s economic growth. It requires a commitment of nation-building, an expression which I use advisedly in this Chamber because the concept of nation-building is something that my country, the United Kingdom, has long experience of, as have France and Spain and some other European countries. But it is wholly and utterly away from the knowledge of other emerging superpowers who have not, to put it bluntly, a clue how to punch their way out of a paper bag in terms of nation-building.
We need to be able to connect ourselves with the body of historic knowledge that is reposited in the consciousness of European nations, to help other nations who are taking a lead around the world in the process of nation-building. Had we done that, and had Prime Minister Blair done that, I think the situation in Iraq, for example, would have been completely different.
Is Iraq a fragile state? Yes it is, because it is unstable; the governance is not secure; there are insecurity problems. There are other countries in Africa which are very fragile – the Sudan, Somalia, small islands – as I said earlier all these require coming together with a body of knowledge that we already have and therefore I am very pleased indeed to be opening this debate this morning."@en1
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