Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-15-Speech-1-194"
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"en.20081215.17.1-194"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to make two brief comments.
Issues surrounding the control of arms exports in countries outside the European Union, disarmament, and arms control in general, cannot be dealt with in an internal market directive. They could only be dealt with if we had not just a common, but a Community, foreign and security policy in the European Union – and we do not. For that reason, we need to stick to what we can do, which is my second comment.
As long as we in the Member States of the European Union consider armed forces to be necessary, and as long as we believe that we can only guarantee our security by maintaining – or perhaps we should say by also maintaining – armed forces, European taxpayers will have a right to expect to get as efficient a service as possible for their money. The European market in defence-related products is quite simply inefficient: it wastes an unbelievable amount of money that would be better used to purchase more modern, higher-tech weapons that would be better for the armed forces, and that would be better used to improved Europe’s security. If you ask yourselves how it can be that European defence, in total, costs almost 40% of the US defence budget, and yet the efficiency and performance of the European armed forces are less than 10% of the US forces, then you will see where the problem lies. It lies, amongst other things, in the fact that we have this unnecessarily complex and expensive system of licensing for the intra-Community arms market.
Simply by doing away with the licences we currently still have, we will be able to save EUR 450 million a year, just from that one action. For the Member State to which Mr Van Orden referred and which would in future be able to spend a significant proportion of the savings on its own defence budget, that was at any rate reason enough to support the Commission's proposal. We must draw attention to the improved performance of the European market in defence-related products, in other words to the improved efficiency of our defence and security – because that is what it comes down to in reality – and to the reduction in our dependence on arms from countries outside Europe. There is a parallel directive to this one, namely the Directive on defence procurement, which is yet to be debated in Parliament. The Commission deliberately presented these two directives as a package, because the two measures will only be fully effective if the second part is adopted. I would therefore, in conclusion, ask you to adopt not only the present draft, but also the forthcoming draft on European defence procurement."@en1
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