Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-03-10-Speech-1-088"
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"en.20080310.17.1-088"2
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"Madam President, let me say categorically that we must not permit the United States to split Europe. The European Union must act as one, because that is the only way for it to make its distinctive mark and to carry weight on the international stage. This applies especially to its dealings with the United States.
A single Member State naturally possesses less clout than the European Union as a community. Nevertheless, by going it alone, a Member State can weaken the Union as a whole and indeed seriously weaken it. Such an approach gnaws at the very core of Europe’s credibility. It virtually gives the United States a hammer, served on a silver platter, with which to drive a wedge through Europe, enabling Washington to obtain from individual states what it cannot obtain from the Union as a whole.
The negotiations between the United States and the EU that culminated in the agreement of July 2007 on the transfer of passenger name records showed that it was scarcely possible for the Union to secure US acceptance of any of its positions. In the view of many Europeans, and in my opinion too, that agreement already lets the United States access too much information on European air passengers. Moreover, we do not even know exactly how these data are being used or to whom they are being passed on. The fundamental question is whether these stacks of data serve any purpose at all in the fight against terrorism. I therefore find it downright grotesque that individual Member States are now going even further than the agreement requires and are letting themselves be drawn into a kind of horse-trading in which visa waivers are being bartered for the transfer of even more data. That cannot be in the interests of the general public. Citizens of these Member States would certainly be given the right to enter the United States without a visa, as other EU citizens already can, but at what cost for all of us?
No, such an approach exposes Europe to the risk of blackmail. If the Member States do not act together and show solidarity, and if they do not nurture the cohesion of the Union, we should not be surprised if people in the United States do not take the European Union seriously."@en1
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