Madam High Representative… your impossible challenge
(BRUSSELS2) During the debate on the common foreign and security policy, which has just taken place in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Arnaud Danjean, the chairman of the defense sub-committee, made a statement which deserves to be repeated in full. It's clean, polite, precise and very fair (in English, we could say "acute"... I'll give you the whole thing, because I don't really see what we can add!
“Madam High Representative,
You are the custodian of a European foreign policy faced with an impossible challenge:
- on the one hand, an ever-increasing demand from our fellow citizens and our partners for a collective European response to diplomatic and security challenges; "Where is Europe? What is Europe doing?", this is what we hear in our public opinion but also from Lampedusa to Nairobi, from Aleppo to Bamako.
- on the other hand, prerogatives and capacities for initiative prisoners of increasingly cautious national political will and increasingly reduced national capacities.
Reducing this deadly gap for Europe's influence on the international scene is the challenge of this annual parliamentary report.
The main danger is dispersion, the inability to give us, collectively, realistic priorities, particularly in a budgetary context so constrained. The goal is not to plant the European flag everywhere for the principle of being everywhere, the goal is to be where we have our interests and our values to defend, where we are expected, where we are hoped for and above all where we can be effective, where we can provide collective added value.
It is undeniably in our eastern and southern neighborhood that our credibility is at stake.
In the Balkans, in the Middle East, in Africa, in the Caucasus, if we are unable to collectively play a major role in these regions, it is pointless to hope to exert the slightest influence on the international scene, and it is pointless to hope to convince our fellow citizens of the relevance of the European project. »
