Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioners, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks for this debate, especially as we are also celebrating a premiere in the debate being opened by the Defence Minister of the Spanish Presidency. I think this is a positive message, one that we receive as such and for which we are grateful. Mr President-in-Office, I also think you were right in what you said at the end about terrorism and what Spain is quite rightly trying to do about it. Looking, though, at the post-11 September political landscape, I feel that here too we may have taken a lot of decisions and discussed a lot of things, but that a lot of momentum has been lost in the national ministerial machinery as regards the actual implementation of this campaign against terrorism and the clarification of the issues on the interface between external and internal security. In this very week just past, the European Mission in the Middle East has shown us how little political influence we have. One reason for our lack of influence is that, alongside our great efforts on the foreign aid front – the European Union gives three times as much in overseas aid as the United States of America – and despite our growing involvement in the field of civil crisis management, we are still not in a position to give real security guarantees because our military capacity is still far from sufficiently developed. The decisions we have made in recent years, ranging from the Treaty of Amsterdam by way of Cologne to the present day, were outstanding, but their implementation is still, in many areas, deplorable in the extreme. Following as I do the debates in some of our Member States on the A 400 M cargo aircraft, they indicate to me that the objective may well be in view and figures are perhaps provided, but the actual implementation and equipment are inadequate and too slow; hence we play a small role because we are not taken seriously, because we cannot really deliver, and because things are not being implemented as they should be. This brings us, of necessity, to the institutional issues. Mr President-in-Office of the Council, I disagree with your statement that this is an exclusively intergovernmental function. Overseas aid and civil crisis management are to a large extent a matter for the first pillar and their financing should be handled via the Budget. It is not solely and exclusively an intergovernmental function, but a combined one, and, seeing that its weaknesses are on the intergovernmental side, we therefore think that the Convention must make improvements and come to final decisions notwithstanding the need to allow for issues of national sovereignty, which play a role in this issue. We cannot, with Brussels, come to majority decisions to the effect that the soldiers of every EU country are to go to war. The national parliaments have important things to say about this. Yet we must, for example, get the idea of enhanced cooperation accepted, in order to bring into being a coalition of the willing. In Nice, we achieved this everywhere except in the area of defence policy, just where we needed it most. In Nice, this was, alas, prevented; we must make the decisive breakthrough now. We want, clearly, to do this jointly with our partners in NATO, which is indispensable to collective security. We also have to organise European security and defence policy in such a way that those NATO states that are not in the EU do not feel themselves excluded. An intensive dialogue must take place, and hence I also think it right that we should find a solution with Turkey so that there is a proper process of consultation if something happens in Turkey's vicinity. In this sense, it is to be hoped that the agreements, which we have unfortunately not had officially submitted to us, represent steps in the right direction. The Council, though, must take up a clear position, so that the European Union's autonomous right of decision as such is not thereby jeopardised. Perhaps this will be supplied in the course of this debate, and we will thereby become more secure in our position on this issue. We must recognise that we agree on many things, but not on how they are to be implemented. This is true also of arms policy. We see how there is an ever-growing technological gap between Europeans and the USA, and that we are no longer able to really wage war together, because the technological differences have become so massive. This has catastrophic consequences, not only for our defence policy capacity, but also in terms of industrial policy, which makes it also an issue for Europe's internal market. I am glad to see Commissioner Liikanen here with Commissioner Patten. I can well imagine that this interface with industrial and arms policy will mean that the European Research Framework Programme for Joint Projects could increasingly be used in the field of military research. Perhaps consideration could be given to how this might be done and to how resources can be pooled in acquiring equipment. There are certain things that we can acquire jointly – transport capacity is one example – in order to synergise on that basis in maintenance, acquisitions and much else, thus achieving more reasonable costs. We spend 60% of what the United States does on military requirements, but with 10% of the outcome that they achieve. This obviously has to do with us being organised in the wrong way. This means, if our budget resources really are tight even at a European and national level, that it must surely be possible for us to organise ourselves in such a way – that is, on Community lines – as to do what has to be done and achieve the desired effects in our common interest. This naturally involves the arms exports issue and the clarification of European competences in order to remove the lack of uniformity in the code of conduct. The European Union must get better at protecting its interests, including the military ones, and also in order to secure peace. Mr President-in-Office of the Council, I agree with you, and believe that the example you have given is a very good one, that a community with a common currency also has common interests in security policy. This is a reason why we must reach the point where, in a European Union with an internal common market, a common currency and a common legal system, we no longer have areas with a lower standard of security. We must enforce a common standard of security. I wish to express my gratitude for our being permitted to advance this in a cooperative process. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE