Paris, 22 January 2003: For his first visit as the newly elected President of the Assembly, Jan Dirk Blaauw chose Athens, where he met representatives of the current WEU and EU Presidency on Monday 20 and Tuesday 21 January.
“It was important for me to start my term of office with a visit to the dual Presidency”, he said, “because important decisions concerning the ESDP and WEU have to be prepared or taken during the Greek Presidency and we need to make sure that national parliaments can contribute to the further development of Europe’s security and defence policy and to its institutional framework”.
Mr Blaauw, who met Foreign Affairs Minister George Papandreou on Monday, said that the Presidency and the Assembly would fully cooperate in order to ensure maximum involvement in the ESDP by the national parliamentarians of member states. With that aim in mind, the Assembly and the Presidency will be co-hosting a colloquy on transatlantic security relations in Athens on 17 and 18 March of this year. Mr Blaauw urged Minister Papandreou to redouble the Presidency’s efforts to find a European consensus with regard to the Iraq question and in line with Assembly Recommendation 720. The priority must be to disarm Iraq. Military intervention could only be the last resort, he said. Mr Blaauw pointed to the total waste of human life inherent in a war with Iraq and to the enormous cost of such a conflict. This was money that could be used to rebuild the Balkans.
Regarding the discussion within the Convention on the Future of Europe on a possible “solidarity clause”, Mr Blaauw said that the current proposal would not constitute an Article V-type of commitment and therefore could not replace the modified Brussels Treaty. He suggested reviving the idea of a Joint European Coast Guard to ensure solidarity between the various maritime nations. Given current problems, such as illegal immigration and environmental threats to Europe’s shores, this proposal was relevant both in a humanitarian and a security context.
Minister Papandreou, who is himself a member of the Convention, asked the President for the Assembly’s views on the best way of organising interparliamentary scrutiny of Europe’s intergovernmental cooperation on security and defence. Mr Blaauw said that the Assembly would continue to provide the Convention with proposals for enhancing the role of national parliaments in the EU.
Mr Blaauw also held talks with Defence Minister Yannos Papantoniou in which they discussed progress made by the Headline Goal working groups and ways and means of increasing defence spending. They agreed that although the ESDP had already been declared operational at the 2001 Laeken Summit, there still was a long way to go before the EU member states were technically capable of performing the full range of Petersberg missions or reached a political consensus on doing so.
Mr Blaauw argued the case for greater transparency in intergovernmental cooperation: “If we want our citizens to support the goals of ESDP, it is important to provide a link between our governments in Brussels and our electorate in our constituencies”. He explained that voters would be prepared to accept supplementary funding for modern defence equipment if they understood the rationale behind it. Europeans, he believed, wanted a stronger political role for the EU in international affairs. They would not accept the inefficiency resulting from fragmented armaments markets, nor would they be satisfied with anything less than state-of-the-art equipment for their forces if these were to be deployed in theatres of conflict.
(President Jan Dirk Blaauw’s biography is appended to this press release. Pictures of his visit to Athens can be downloaded from the Assembly’s website, Press Section. Recommendation 720 on the Iraq question is also available on the website.)