Paris, 6 November 2002: Returning from Helsinki, where he attended the Session of the Nordic Council Parliamentary Assembly and the Nordic Council of Ministers, held from 29-31 October 2002, to mark the 50th anniversary of Nordic cooperation, President Klaus Bühler said the visit had contributed to intensifying relations between the two interparliamentary assemblies. Mr Bühler met Ms Outi Ojala, the outgoing President of the Nordic Council and congratulated her on the achievements of 50 years of Nordic interparliamentary cooperation.
Mr Bühler was invited to address the Nordic parliamentarians, and the ministers of foreign affairs and defence, at the start of their session on security and defence policy. He recalled that the Nordic countries brought the fruit of many years of UN peacekeeping experience to bear on European security and that they had been carrying out the sort of tasks, today referred to as the Petersberg missions, well before these became part of EU concerns in the framework of ESDP.
President Bühler encouraged all the Nordic countries, especially Norway and Iceland, to become actively involved in the implementation of Europe’s crisis management capabilities. “Both Norway and Iceland have helped shape the post-war security world – we want them to go on doing so in close cooperation with the EU: we need them by our side just as we need other non-EU nations”, he said.
President Bühler called on Ms Riitta Uosokainen, Speaker of the Finnish Parliament, and discussed the current work of the European Convention with her. They agreed, in line with the long-standing Nordic tradition of detailed parliamentary scrutiny, on the need for national parliaments to play a clear and significant role within the EU thus bringing greater transparency to intergovernmental cooperation and keeping the wider public informed about the issues involved.
Mr Bühler also called on Finnish Defence Minister Jan-Erik Enestam. Referring to the matter of the inclusion of an Article V-type commitment in the EU Treaty, the Minister said that after EU enlargement most EU member states would also be members of NATO and that if remaining members wished to engage in collective defence they had only to join NATO. He expected ESDP to be limited to peacekeeping for the near future.
On the question of creating a formal Council of Defence Ministers within the EU, the Minister took the view that the broader view of security was important. Therefore joint meetings of foreign affairs and defence ministers would be necessary. Mr Bühler believes that closer cooperation among defence ministers could accelerate the implementation of the Headline Goal and foster European armaments cooperation. Mr Enestam suggested that progress could be made if countries were prepared to give up the idea of having their own national defence industry to meet their national defence needs and would instead accept mutual cross-national dependency in armaments production.