Honoured Presidents,
Honoured Prime Ministers,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am extremely pleased to welcome you all to the opening of the IV Summit of Heads of State and Government of the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean. This summit meeting is surely one of the most important, and certainly by far the largest event to take place here in Vienna during our Presidency. I am pleased that so many of you have taken up our invitation to Vienna. A warm welcome!
First of all, I would like to express my hope that the good spirit that reigned yesterday during the final negotiations of the closing document of this summit will inspire today’s talks. After arriving at yesterday’s consensus, we can now concentrate fully on the substance of our political discussions. In addition to the Heads of State, Heads of Government, and Foreign Ministers of the 60 States taking part in the bi-regional process, I extend a warm greeting to the President of the European Commission, Mr Jose Manuel Barroso and the members of the European Commission accompanying him, and to the High Representative and Secretary-General of the Council, Javier Solana.
I wish to extend a particular welcome to the President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, who joins me in chairing this summit. My colleagues from Turkey and Croatia, Mr Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Mr Ivo Sanader, have responded to a personal invitation. They are already candidates for accession and I have asked them to take part in this opening session.
The relationship between our two regions is not created only by the governments but also by countless international organizations and institutions. I have invited some of them as special guests of the Presidency and I am very pleased that they have come. We appreciate very much their contribution to the growth and development of our bi-regional relations and trust that in the future they will continue along this same path. This summit has two particular characteristics in relation to the United Nations. This is the first time this meeting takes place in a city that is also one of the seats of the United Nations. Therefore we are particularly pleased that for the first time, the Secretary-General of the United Nations is taking part in the summit between the European Union, Latin America, and the Caribbean. A warm welcome to you, Secretary-General Kofi Annan!
I hope you agree with me that the States assembled here are among the strongest and most involved supporters of the United Nations system. Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean are supporters of a modern, forward-looking multilateralism, as expressed in the UN reform, where both regions together have moved a great deal forward. And this outlook will remain, not only today but also in the future. Looking back to the first summit in June 1999 in Rio de Janeiro, when we set this process in motion, what was the common ground we hoped to build on?
Europe shares common values with Latin America and the Caribbean, traditions, a humanistic view of people and society. We feel called to ensure together that human rights, tolerance, openness and pluralism are taken seriously in the international debate and simply become a fact of life. The cooperation between our two groupings of States should stand as a model for other regions. In Rio we spoke for the first time of a strategic partnership and we committed ourselves to two fundamental goals:
First, bi-regional collaboration, in which we ask ourselves: what can we, as regions, do together, where can we help each other? The second question is: How can we better work together at the multilateral level, where can we combine our forces and set the ball rolling in global issues?
Today, seven years on, and after two more summits and 20 meetings of senior officials, we are working together very closely and as a matter of course in many areas that were only very carefully named, touched on or mentioned for the first time in Rio. But we must also ask ourselves in a mood of self-examination whether we have really done everything that we might have undertaken. And there, the answer can only be a self-critical no. And so here in Vienna, we cannot have a summit of self-satisfied, empty rhetoric; this must be a working meeting where we improve on our own work.
Summit meetings often develop their own dynamic. Their true value perhaps lies not only in the fact that representatives of the highest political rank exchange their views for a few hours. It lies rather in the unbelievably strong push and pull effect that a summit meeting of this kind can generate. By holding this summit we ensure that the two regions have comprehensive, systematic and regular dealings with each other.
We make sure that there are preparatory meetings, that decisions are made that would only come about much later if at all, without the deadline pressure of a summit, and that the summit documents express, with great exactitude, where we stand and where we want to go together.
Two years ago in Guadalajara, when I offered to hold this summit in Vienna during our EU Presidency, I had no conception of what a lively interest in Latin America and the Caribbean this event would arouse in Austria and in all of Europe. This is true not only of the government bodies, the bureaucracy, the foreign ministries - it goes much deeper. I am especially pleased by the extraordinary interest of the media in Latin America and the Caribbean and in the economic and political developments there, that we have seen over the past months. And I am pleased about the many preparatory events, not only at ministerial and official level, but also among the citizens and civil society in a broader sense - the NGOs, universities, churches and cultural institutions.
There is a genuine interest in the other region, its culture, way of life, and an eloquent expression of this interest is, in the final analysis, an alternative summit taking place at the same time as our meeting, a few kilometres from here. Even if governments might not agree with everything that is said there, we should take the engagement of the participants in that summit very seriously, and we will look carefully at what they tell us since there too concerns, needs, hopes and visions are expressed that we cannot view with indifference.
In preparation for this meeting we have done a lot of work on the regions. The European Commission has published new communications to the Council on Latin America and the Caribbean replacing those of ten years ago. The Foreign Ministers have arrived at far-reaching conclusions on the topic. The European Parliament - and I would like to extend warm greetings to President Josef Borrell - has also delivered its detailed opinion. When we put all these documents side by side, they speak of the massive interest of Europe and the European Union in Latin America and the Caribbean and a “yes” to further development of our relations.
As you know, we have succeeded during the Austrian Presidency in brokering an agreement on the Financial Perspective up to the year 2013. Parliament has played a particularly constructive role, for which I am very grateful. This agreement makes it possible for us not only to have good intentions but also to offer concrete actions. It seems important to me, for our bi-regional relations, that we also have the courage to enter new territory. That is not always easy. One party pulls in one direction another in the other, sometimes there are very large differences. We must simply deal with them in friendship and in partnership. I am pleased that particularly since Guadalajara, many new themes have been addressed - social cohesion, and of particular interest, energy and the question of migration. Of course our way of looking at things is not the same everywhere but it is of value when partners are prepared to listen to the other’s point of view, to be curious about each other’s opinion. Our summit meeting is the first that has not taken place in Latin America or on the Iberian Peninsula. I think there is an opportunity there. A good summit meeting in Vienna should show that the whole European Union is taking part in cooperation with Latin America and the Caribbean, that this cooperation is not limited to those European countries where Spanish or Portuguese is spoken. They naturally have a leading function, they are door-openers. But we other countries are very interested in the partnership too.
For the first time, a business summit is taking place in parallel with the political meeting. At the last meetings in Madrid and Guadalajara, I had the impression that this dimension has potential for further development and I am sure that the first EU-LSI Business Summit will be a success. We will hear a short report on it at the closing meeting. We will adopt an extensive closing document, the details of which I will not discuss here. I believe it is a balanced document and I would like to give hearty thanks to the Foreign Ministers and senior officials on both sides who have negotiated over this document intensively for several months and who concluded their work yesterday.
Two years ago, not least thanks to our imaginative Mexican hosts, we had a new format for our meeting. First, three parallel work tables met, where small groups of 20 Heads of State and Government carried on discussions. This format was effective, and we will continue with it.
Let me close on an optimistic note. The Union hears from many sides that we are too focused on ourselves in Europe, that our great themes, such as enlargement and the new constitution, make us concentrate so much on ourselves that we pay too little attention to outside relations. This criticism is not always unjustified and we take it very seriously.
I believe that with today’s summit meeting and tomorrow’s summits with the sub-regions and individual States, we are creating a strong emphasis on foreign policy that will be impressive because of the participation of so many Heads of State and Government of both regions. For this reason it is a real pleasure for me to declare our fourth meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean open.
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