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- [00:00]
Damian Chalmers
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to this, the latest in the LSE European Institute ACPO Perspectives on Europe series. I'm Damian Chalmers, head of the European Institute here at the lsc and for today's event it's a great pleasure to welcome Chris Bryant, the British Minister for Europe. Now, it's a particular pleasure because it's wonderful to welcome a Minister for Europe who not only has a Europe in hinterland but other hinterlands. And Chris was Head of European affairs at the BBC. He was also chair of the Labour movement for Europe. So he's had an interest and a passion for this topic way before his ministerial appointment. But he also has, and I think this is equally important, other hinterlands that are particularly significant. He spent time in the Church, has also spent time on the Culture and Media Committee and has had a particular interest in constitutional reform, particularly working on reform of the House of Lords. He will be speaking for, well, probably about half an hour and then we'll take questions. Happy to welcome him to the platform. Thank you very much for coming here.
- [01:20]
Chris Bryant
Thanks very much. I'm a bit disturbed by having this blue light pointing directly at my eyes. I could at least have a Labour red light. And I'm always a bit embarrassed when I hear about my past life because it feels a bit as if my. I've never managed to hold down a job for more than two years really, but I'm hoping to hold this one down for a little bit longer. I should apologize for the title which. The Traitor's Kiss. I think it's because I was reading a book called the Traitor's Kiss, which is a biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was the first person who held my post in 1782. He wasn't minister for Europe, obviously, because there wasn't a European Union and all the rest of the time. But he was the first Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He wrote a blockbuster play called Pizarro which earned him, I think something like £13,261 in 61 performances which made him the kind of Andrew Lloyd Webber of his era without the terrible music and the awful politics. So I apologize for the title, I'm not going to talk about the title at all. But what I am here to do is to talk about the profound and irremediable damage I believe that British Euroscepticism does to the British interest and to argue for a far more ambitious British approach within the European Union to our trading and political relations with the growing World economies. Now, I fully accept that that's not quite how the Eurosceptics see it. They believe that they are the sole doughty defenders of the British interest and that it is successive British governments under Brown, Blair, major and even Mrs. Thatcher who signed up to the Single European act who have betrayed Britain. They argue that we have destroyed a thousand years of British history, that Europe draws up 90% of our legislation, that membership of the European Union was sold to us in the UK's 1975 referendum as merely an economic free trade association and never as a political union, that our membership of the union is inordinately expensive and that Westminster, the ancient seat of English liberties, is completely neutered by Brussels. So they say. What is genuinely distressing about these Eurosceptic arguments is that they are so historically inaccurate. Some of you in the room may remember the book 1066 and all that from the early 20th century, which was a kind of version of British history, which was everything that you could remember about British history. And it feels to me that this is the kind of history that the Eurosceptics have gone for in 1066. And all that kings were either a good thing with a capital G and a capital T or a bad thing with a capital B and a capital T. At the end of the book, the United States became top nation again, Capital T, capital N. And my favorite moment was the description of the Reformation and the creation of the Church of England was. And the Pope and all his followers seceded from the C of E. So let me just put some facts straight for our Eurosceptic friends. Britain is no less British by virtue of being a member of the European Union. Nor is France less French, or Italy rather less Italian. Barely a tenth of UK legislation actually is a direct transposition of EU law. Our Parliament still determines how to incorporate every single element of EU legislation into our own laws. And our courts determine how the European Convention on Human Rights applies in the UK under the Human Rights Act. Our contribution to the European union amounts to 1% of our national wealth. And the Union increases EU gross domestic product by approximately 2%, equating to a UK boost of 25 billion pounds a year. The Foreign Office estimates that the single market is worth the equivalent of £300 per person in terms of added value, which is nearly five times the amount per head the UK government contributes to the Union. And our membership of Europe was always sold, if that's the right word, as an economic and a political union, for the simple reason that you can never divorce economics from Politics and because at the heart of the Union lies a political belief that democracy, freedom and the pooling of national sovereignty will bring peace and prosperity to a continent that has been marred by centuries of vicious bloodshed and gross inequality. Incidentally, it's worth pointing out in parenthesis that Parliament, the British Parliament, has something of a self aggrandizing habit. We tend to think that we are the oldest representative assembly in the world. Wrong. Just in case anybody's wondering, it's Iceland's Althing, which first sat in 929. Second, we tend to think that it was the English who dreamt up the idea of an elected Parliament for England. Again, wrong. It was a Frenchman who first suggested it, Simon de Montfort. Though we tend to call him Simon de Montfort to make him sound more English. Thirdly, people suggest that the lines on the carpet in the House of Commons have been there from time immemorial to make sure that they are two swords lengths apart. So you can't draw your sword on another member. Complete and utter tosh. The first time a carpet was introduced was in 1950 and there have been never lines on the floor previous to that, as members were not allowed to bring a sword into the parliament since the 16th century. That's why we have little pegs in the coat room for us to leave our swords. Nor do the phrases toe the line, it's in the bag or on the fence come from the House of Commons. Most of them actually come from naval terminology. Ignorance, I would suggest, is no excuse in law or in politics, or for that matter, in foreign affairs. So let me try and deal with a few more urban myths. First, Britain's membership of the EU does not dismantle our history or Noosa parliament. Second, just because one supports the UK's active engagement with the European Union to does not mean that one is unpatriotic. I am every bit as proud of being British as the next person. I may have spent a few years living in Spain and in Belgium, but I like being British. I like our historic defence of personal freedom against arbitrary government. I value our peculiarly British way of doing things. And I feel a lump in my throat when Brits win medals and for that matter, in particular expectation of Saturday when Wales beats England at rugby. I just happen to believe that Euroscepticism, that the euroscepticism that is prevalent in parts of British society and which seems to have seized hold of Her Majesty's opposition like a severe bout of influenza, undermines the British interest at every single turn. It's an act of false patriotism. Third, Euroscepticism is nowhere near as dominant in the UK as many people presume. When my father first went to work in Spain in the 1950s, he was virtually a working class pioneer. Hardly anybody else from South Wales had been to Spain. Now roughly a million Brits live in Spain and 17 million visit every year. That's in a normal year. This last year because of the recession, it's been something like 11 million. Another 3 million visit Greece. My constituents in the Ronde in South Wales, many of whom work in the aeronautical industry, will travel quite happily to Germany or to France when their skills are needed there. Even our food has been transformed over the last 30 years with pizza and pasta, a mainstay of every student's life. We may sound Eurosceptic, but actually we've become steadily more European over the years. And on enlargement of the European Union we have undoubtedly been the most passionate supporters and and the most effective campaigners. There's a fourth wrong headed, but I'm sure, well, maybe well intentioned Eurosceptic argument that instead of binding ourselves to the European Union, we should spend more time building our relations with the Commonwealth and the English speaking countries. This is an argument that is regularly advanced by some of the dimmer members of the House of Commons. Of course, the Commonwealth and the English speaking world matters to us economically and politically. Over a million Brits live Today in Australia, 600,000 live each in the United States of America and in Canada and 200,000 in New Zealand. We do £12.6 billion worth of bilateral trade with India and £1 billion with Pakistan. But I just don't see this as a zero sum game. The insular mentality that constantly refers back just to the old British Empire is completely and utterly mistaken. It's mistaken historically, apart from anything else. Yes, we do more trade with the USA than our European Union neighbours do individually, but France is the single biggest, it is the second biggest investor in the uk. Yes, we have historic ties with India which we should build on, but we do also with other fast growing economies which were never part of the British Empire. We were the first country to recognize Mexico's independence. Around 300,000 British tourists visit Mexico annually and over 3,000 Mexicans come here to study each year. And at the moment in 2010, we're just celebrating the 200th anniversary of when Simon Bolivar came from Latin America to the UK to try and find finance for his liberation movement to liberate Latin America from Spanish oppression. Likewise, almost all of Brazil's 19th century inward investment came from the UK. That's why the Sao Paulo railway is nicknamed Ingleza the English, because it was constructed and run by a British company to bring coffee from the inland plateau to the Atlantic. Sadly, the son of a British railway engineer who worked on Linglese, a man called Charles Miller, introduced football to Brazil, which probably wasn't a good idea. Indeed, this influence of Britain in Latin America is true for much of the region. In Peru we didn't only receive Paddington here, but we also were the second largest investor. Indeed, we are now the second largest investor. And it was an English family, the Flemings, who developed Inca Cola, one of the few soft drinks that outsells in its native country, Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola. And the Subte, the underground in Buenos Aires still runs on the British side of the road. Guess why? Because it was built by British people. So the UK should, I believe, be far more ambitious in its global pretensions. But our membership of the European Union, far from undermining that ambition, I believe gives it free reign. Let's look at the facts. In each of the four BRIC countries. The EU is the largest trading partner in Brazil and India. The EU accounts for over a fifth of total trade and Brazil is the single biggest exporter of agricultural products to the eu. The EU is also China's biggest trading partner and China is now the EU's second largest trading partner behind the USA EU. India trade doubled between 2003 and 2007, with EU investment to India tripling in the same period. And the EU is by far Russia's biggest trading partner, accounting for over half of Russia's overall trade turnover in 2008. And with three quarters of all Russia's direct foreign investment coming from the member states of the European Union. That is not to say that all in the union is rosy. Despite its many advantages, the EU has systematically, I would suggest, failed to make as many inroads into these growing economies as it could or it should. So for instance, agreements reached between Russia and the European Union on World Trade Organization accession sit unimplemented while Russia continues to introduce new, more protectionist measures. China is very hesitant about discussions on human rights, whilst EU citizens who care passionately about human rights consume hundreds of billions of euros worth of Chinese goods every year. India has so far been unable to break down both tariff barriers and non tariff barriers to trade. And we're working hard with the Indian government to improve the prospects for developing business and investment opportunities between the EU and India, but so far have not achieved much And Europe failed to get China, India and others to agree to the EU's proposals for a sustainable global deal on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of last year. So there are questions that the European Union has to face up to. We cannot afford to ignore the shortfall in the EU's ambitions. I think the problem is threefold. A when it comes to exercising harder power around the world, the EU is only as strong as its most reluctant member. So it only takes one member state to say no, or even maybe for there to be no action at all. B there's an immense temptation for each member state to pursue its own private economic or commercial interests to the exclusion of others. And C non EU states know this. So when faced with the EU trying to project its interest, countries outside the EU will focus on individual EU members and try to pick off the easiest one, the one whose commitment to the policy in question is the wobbliest. That's why the EU not only struggles to be more than the sum of its whole, but can end up sometimes being less than the sum of its whole. This is not an argument, I should say, for us to move to a system of qualified majority voting for external policy, fiscal autonomy and the right to determine one's own foreign and security policy must remain with the member states. But the EU must get better at convincing its member states of the power of a united front when it comes to external relations. And the member states, all of us, if we have a genuinely global ambition, must develop a much greater sense of discipline. We know this is possible. Faced with the global economic crisis, every member of the EU took concerted action over the last two years. And that concerted action achieved far more than action in any one country could hope for. We need a similar approach, I would argue this year, to tackling the deficits and building growth across the Union. But we also need concerted action in relation to the emerging economic giants like Russia, China, India, Brazil and Mexico. Top of the list is Russia as a whole. This the EU imports around a quarter of its gas needs from Russia. That amounts to around 118 billion euros a year and is a sizeable proportion of Russia's total exports. But different EU members import vastly different amounts. A number of EU countries import all of their gas needs from Russia, while the gas we use in the UK contains a minimal amount of Russian gas. That's why EU members such as Bulgaria, with 98% of its gas from Russia, so suffered so badly when Russian gas via the Ukraine stopped flowing into the EU in January 2009, while we in the UK were largely unaffected. Concerted action across the EU can help to mitigate the risk to individual members, but as I said, it will require real discipline. So we need to continue working on gas interconnection across the eu. We need to fully liberalize the EU energy market and we need to diversify energy supplies. This is an urgent problem and one we cannot continue to evade. That's why at the EU Russia summit in Stockholm in November, the EU agreed to an early warning mechanism on energy with Russia. It's an agreement that allows the EU to monitor developments in the Russia Ukraine gas relationship and therefore be in a better position to know of and react to any future problems. The summit showed that the EU can work better when it can work together when it comes to Russia for the benefit of both the EU and Russia. But it needs to do so more resolutely and with determination, not turning a blind eye to the very significant human rights problems there are in Russia. At the same time, at the same summit, the EU also announced a new initiative to support Russia's modernization agenda. President Medvedev has said that Russia needs to diversify its economy so that it isn't so heavily reliant on oil and gas exports. He's absolutely right. Such diversification would also benefit the eu, as it would make Russia a more stable, less asymmetric trading partner. And as the EU is Russia's largest trading partner, we're in a position to help them achieve their aims. I'm going to Russia in a week's time and I hope that part of what we can achieve over these next few months, with different visits from my counterparts as well to Russia, is a unified approach. Always making the human rights argument, always making the argument for greater openness and transparency in Russia, but also always making the argument for a better and more significant trade relationship. Second, China and India. 2008 saw China's economy growing grow larger than Germany's in nominal terms this year. It is expected to eclipse Japan within the next 15 years. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that China's economy will overtake the US to become the world's largest. China and India are now the most and the third most preferred location for inward investment around the world. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and EU. India trade doubled to over 55 billion euros between 2003 and 2007. The EU is already China and India's largest trading partner. But we cannot rely on our historic dominance. Today, Asia, not Europe as a whole, produces over 80% of all the Computers and over half of all the textiles and electronics in the world. Every time you ring a call center, there is a greater than 50% chance you'll be speaking to someone in India. And when you buy something made of plastic, the odds are that the plastic came from Malaysia. That is why 70% of recent global growth has come not from the older developed world, but from developing and emerging nations. The trend is absolutely clear. But the European Union has not mastered the business of dealing with either China or India. All too often it veers between, on the one hand, rather patronizing neocolonial attitudes and on the other, virtually supplicant messages. So if Europe wants to continue to be a key player in the world trade, it has to adapt. Third, Mexico and Brazil. Brazil is the largest beef exporter in the world, accounting for 32% of the world beef exports and expects its production and export to increase by 30% in the next seven years. It is also the world's largest exporter of coffee, sugar, soy and grain, and the second biggest exporter of poultry and pork. But Brazil remains a very protected market with many tariff and non tariff barriers to free trade. Likewise, Mexico has enormous economic potential, not least because of its northern border with the us. But many of its assets remain locked behind old legislation. In particular the petrocarbons that are probably underneath the Gulf of Mexico and need to be extracted. For Mexico to be able to succeed economically over the next 10, 15, 20 years, need inward investment from the West. But whilst they retain the legislation which ensures that everything that is underneath the ground in Mexico belongs to the State of Mexico and cannot be owned by anyone other than the people of Mexico, it will be impossible for external investors to make that long term investment. There has been a tendency in European thinking to leave Latin America to Spain and to Portugal. I believe this is a profound mistake. We need a whole Europe approach to the region and especially to the growing powers of Mexico and Brazil. It needs to recognize the specific challenges of the region, especially in relation to minerals and petrocarbons, as well as the problems of endemic poverty and violence. But it should be on the basis of open, free and fair trade. So, a few suggestions. One, the European Union should continue to seek new annual economic dialogues with countries to be taken forward by the High Rep. Representative for Foreign Policy. A new creation of the Lisbon Treaty, Cathy Ashton. Second, the new Commission should step up activity to identify and act on protectionist measures and barriers to trade and investment that harm Europe's businesses under a new EU market access strategy. 3. The EU should continue to pursue free trade agreements offering substantive opportunities to EU business. 4. The EU must do all it can to conclude the Doha Development Agenda, which is likely to deliver around US$170 billion in global growth annually. 5. The EU must prioritise the removal or reduction of tariffs to free up trade in low carbon and environmental goods and services to complement the agreement reached in Copenhagen. 6. The EU should secure further extension of free and fair trade in Latin America with an accompanying reform of the common agricultural policy. I'm looking forward to saying that sentence in France. 7. The European Union should push for a new energy law in Mexico to release the economic potential of petrocarbons in the Gulf and for reform in Brazil to provide greater legislative certainty and economic stability for EU investors. 8. The EU should play a key role in binding the growing economies in the G20 into strong global concerted economic and financial action to ensure there can be no repeat of the worldwide economic crisis. There's just one thing that I'd say in addition, about the tone in which I think that we have to approach these emerging economies, because there was a time when we spoke, when we saw a humbled Russia, when the Soviet era was passed, when I think we adopted a rather patronizing attitude with India. All too often we've been patronizing with China, we've been patronizing with Mexico and Brazil as well. And I was sitting in the theatre a couple of years ago and there was a couple sitting in front of me who'd had a terrible row. And just as they, as the play was about to begin, the woman said to the husband, and the worst of it is that you are so bloody patronizing. And he turned to her and kissed her on the forehead as he said, it's patronizing, dear. Now, I think that that style of attitude has all too often pervaded our approach to the emerging economies. And that's one of the things that we have to avoid. Let me end with a growing economy on our own doorstep. Turkey, now the 16th largest economy in the world. The Bosphorus Tiger, as I like to think of it. Europe, I believe, will make one of the biggest mistakes imaginable if it does not ease the way to Turkey's accession in the Union. Yes, it is absolutely right that much reform is needed in Turkey. But a Turkey that looks west is undeniably in our economic and our political and our security interests. I've tried to argue two things this evening. I hope you noticed them. First, that Euroscepticism is a false patriotism because it fails the political eye test. It fails to see that the British interest, our standard of living and our influence overseas is not undermined by our membership of the Union, but is enormously enhanced by it. And second, that the EU needs to be far more imaginative, disciplined. Europe doesn't tend to like the word disciplined and resolute in its approach towards the growing economies of the world. If we fail, Europe will languish and the UK with it. If we succeed, I think we stand to build a new era where the EU and the UK play a pivotal role in ensuring sustainable growth based on free and fair trade. It's a prize of ultimate worth. Thank you very much.
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Damian Chalmers
Just as we were coming up the stairs, said it would be dry and I was getting quite intrigued by the idea of a dry traitor's kiss. And then you said it wouldn't be a tracer's kiss and it certainly wasn't dry. So I very much enjoyed it. Now, we got about 40 minutes for questions. I'll take them in groups of three. Would anyone like to raise their hand? There are waving mics just behind. Gentleman there. If you could identify yourself, that would be great.
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Donald Davidson
Donald Davidson. Yeah. Well, one issue you didn't mention, of course, is the whole issue of corruption within the European Union. The waste and fraud, the common agricultural product is well known. I remember Robin Cook insisting back in 1998 that the cap was about to be reformed next year, insisting to John Humphreys and another more closer home to labour. In 2004, the chief accountant of the European Commission, Martha Andreasen, was dismissed when she public that EU accounts were open to fraud. And. And the point is that Neil Kinnock was a commissioner who actually sacked her. And there's been another example where an auditor, I think his name was McCoy, was removed when he was raising issues over, I can't remember another EU committee. So I think that the issue, the whole issue of corruption within the European institutions needs to be raised.
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Damian Chalmers
The gentleman, please welcome, Sir Konstantin Shoba. I'm a postgraduate student here at the European Institute.
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Chris Bryant
My question.
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Damian Chalmers
Regards President Obama's decision not to come to Madrid this spring. So the question ultimately is, do you think the new framework created under Lisbon is facilitating those foreign policy ambitions and aims that you've talked about today? Okay, I'll start with ask a third question. You mentioned that, and I share this view that the impact of the EU has been fairly negligible on British history and culture. And I wondered what impact this had for government policy on joining the euro. If the view is that the Euro has not had much impact on British Historical or doesn't have much on national historical cultural identities. And many economists now take the view this is the economically optimal time to join the euro. And maybe the five tests are being met. Will the government be considering joining the Euro in its manifesto? That's the third question.
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Chris Bryant
Somebody said no. I think that's the short answer to the last bit. But I'll come back a bit more to the euro. Donald Corruption and the common agriculture policy. The big difficulty is if you don't have a common agricultural policy, you end up having a French agricultural policy, an Italian agricultural policy, a Greek agricultural policy, a Romanian. I mean, I could go on for another 23 and that would be worse. That would be considerably worse. One of the difficulties about the auditing of the Union is that actually a lot of the money that is spent by the union is spent in the member states by the member states. And most member states object profoundly to the idea of being audited by the EU's auditors. So there's a real logical problem there. Where I completely agree with you is that I don't think that a future budget of the Union should have 43% of its money spent on agriculture. It should be considerably less. And I think that we should be phasing out the direct payments to farmers pillar one of the common Agricultural policy. I think there's also an argument in some incidentally for saying that it's a bit odd for Germany to pay money into the union for the Union, then to pay money to poorer regions in Germany. And there's an argument to say that actually that element should be repatriated back to individual countries. So I think that that will undoubtedly be part of the debate that happens now over the budget this year and into the debate about the next financial perspective. Was it Constantin? I didn't hear your name. Alright, cool. Obama and Madrid. I think it's a bit dark. Madrid's a great city though you don't tend to get much time for tourism at these kind of things. I'm struck by the fact that Hillary Clinton almost immediately rang Kathy Ashton the moment she was appointed and referred to her as opposite number in Europe. And I know Hillary Clinton and Kathy Ashton spoke last night about a particular issue that's going down in the European Parliament. There was a debate this afternoon and there's a vote next week. And I think that that kind of relationship will prove dividends over time. There is a problem, I think about too many summits in the world. I was meeting with about Kazakhstan the other day and Kazakhstan have just taken over the chairmanship of the osce, and they now want a summit of Prime Ministers and heads of government of the osce and Prime Ministers and heads of government can spend all their time travelling nowadays. What I do think is that we have to do two elements to get this right in the future. One is we have to make sure that Cathy has the tools she needs to be able to make sure that the External Action Service is more effective in its representation abroad. That we get rid of. For instance, the fact in Kabul in Afghanistan, there are still two people representing the Union. That's crazy. There should be one united effort there. And secondly, we need to be more disciplined in the way we approach every element of foreign policy. And there will be times when we have to soft pedal on something that is not all that important to us, because we know that we want others to pedal hard on another issue that really does matter to us. But I think the architecture of the EU is now much better than it was before the Lisbon Treaty, and that's one of the main reasons that we supported it on the euro. As somebody who. When the. There was a big row in the UK a few years ago about whether we should go forward for a referendum on Britain joining the euro, I was one of the passionate supporters of our joining the euro. I have to admit that over the last 18 months, the fact that we have not been in the euro has meant that it's been possible for us to be competitive. It's been like a sort of devaluation of the pound around the world. And that has meant that British hotels have not being as empty as they might be, because France, Germany, Italy, Spain, they've all come to the UK because it's relatively cheap to visit now. So I don't predict that we will be putting a clause about the euro in our manifesto, except to say that if we were to suggest that we were going to join the euro at any point, we'd hold a referendum on it.
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Damian Chalmers
More questions, gentleman.
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Chris Bryant
Matt, Hi.
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Unnamed Questioner 1
You started off by kind of saying how there's an innate connection between kind of economics and politics in the eu, and therefore they're kind of one and all, and then painting this picture of every euro skeptic as being some kind of High Tory sort of UKIP supporter, but you didn't kind of mention the political positives of the EU and kind of. I think a lot of people in this country feel let down by the way in which the Prime Minister handled everything to do with the Lisbon Treaty and kind of. How can you now rectify the situation to actually say, actually there are some positives politically that we can gain from the eu, in addition to all of the economic benefits that you so rightly outlined during your speech.
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Maurice Fraser
Thanks, Maurice Fraser. Just wondering, Chris, how you see the prospects for a credible EU policy, which I would very much like to see as a convinced pro European, but a credible European policy towards some of the countries you mentioned with whom we're going to have to be very robust, I think, in order to be credible. We have an increasingly assertive Russia. We have a China with an appalling human rights record and not yet shown in many parts of the world that it wants to be a fully responsible member of the international community. And we have a highly volatile Iran with a crazy regime. And we're going to have to be tough, I think, to be credible. Some European countries, some capitals in Europe will be counseling caution not to upset the horses, often for pretty reasons, evident reasons of commercial self interest. I think we should make every effort to have a Europe wide effective multilateralism in Europe and beyond Europe. In my more pessimistic moods, I despair of our ability to persuade enough of our partners to build that really incredible and as I say, robust European policy. I'm not really sure if this is a question, as I say, I start off from a pro European perspective, but I just wondered how you rate the prospects of us being able to get our partners on board behind what I regard as a serious European policy.
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Chris Bryant
Actually, in answer to a previous question, I was going to say something about Hillary Clinton because it was striking at the Afghanistan conference last week. On the Wednesday evening we had a reception in St James's palace hosted by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. And stunningly beautiful room you had. Virtually every Foreign Secretary in the world was there, from Turkmenistan to New Zealand to the United States of America and so on. And they were all men, apart from two Hillary Clinton and Kathy Ashton. And everybody wanted to have their photograph taken with Hillary Clinton. They all completely lost their sense of dignity. They were sort of begging her. They all sort of their mobile phones out and they get their mates to have their photograph taken. And once they'd done Hillary, then they went over to do Cathy because it was just such a fascinating thing that there were women actually playing a role on the international stage, which was really striking to me in particular, because in the previous, on the Monday, we'd had the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels and you had the 27 foreign ministers round the table and the Finn, Alex, we were having a discussion about Afghanistan and the Finn Alex Stubb said, well, it's a bit rich. We're all talking about the role of women in society in Afghanistan, and there are 27 men around this table and one woman. And Kathy said, yes, and the woman's on top, she's in charge. And then he said, well, I was feeling. It's a bit more like Snow White and the 27 dwarves. The. The positives of the EU. I thought I was trying to do the positives of the eu. I mean, I can go on forever about the positives of the eu, but not least because I think so many people underestimate the fact that in my lifetime, Spain and Portugal were oppressive dictatorships of the right. Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and so on, they were all under the Soviet dictatorship. Greece had a dictatorship of the left. All of those countries, sorry, at the right. Well, and. Well, you take your interpretation, I suppose, but anyway. But the point is that all of those countries aspired to membership of the European Union, in part because of the increased prosperity, but also because of the human rights and the democratic freedoms that brought with it. And how I describe this is, it's a bit like osmosis, that at the borders of the European Union, the other countries then want to aspire to the same. And so now you've got the western Balkans wanting to join, and similarly Turkey and elsewhere. And I think that that is a very positive element of what we've done. Likewise, I refer to the fact that we will not, I think, barring some extraordinary accident of political willpower, have war again in Europe because of the existence in large measure of the European Union. The benefits to the uk, one tiny one that I remember as a child when we lived in Spain, in the north of Spain, all the beaches of Spain, you used to have to take olive oil with you to the beach, because when you stepped on the beach, there'd be chunks of oil off the sea. And the only way to get the thick, tarry oil off was with olive oil. And you don't have to do that anymore because the EU brought in regulations on clean beaches, likewise on clean drinking water and so on. So, I mean, I can wax lyrical on the benefits of EU membership for a long time being robust. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But I think, for instance, in relation to Iran, I think the. The EU three and then the three plus three has been pretty effective. Well, we seem to have. Yesterday we seemed to get movement. We're not quite sure what the movement means. We're not sure whether it's just Ahmadinejad speaking for himself, or whether that's the formal position of the country, and we're not sure how it'll roll out. But you certainly couldn't accuse Europe of not taking a robust position on Iran. And that's despite the fact that, you know, France, Germany and the UK have very different sets of commercial and strategic interests in relation to Iran. But we need to replicate that elsewhere. And so, for instance, Germany and Poland's historic contracts with Russia over gas are a problem in terms of liberalizing energy markets in Europe. And that's one of the things, that's one of the areas where there's going to be hass to be greater discipline across the union. And you're absolutely right that we constantly have to make the same argument about human rights, whether it's in when we have our discussion with Colombia about our free trade agreement with the Andean region, where some countries are wanting to say, well, let's just do a deal anyway and not bother with very strong enforceable human rights clauses, whereas we're trying to say, no, you have to have a very strong human rights clause. Or in relation to Russia, where some people would just prefer to do the trade and not bother to refer to what's happened to journalists over the years, or the criminal justice system, or in relation to China, where some again would prefer just to leave human rights to one side. But the one thing I'd say is the great advantage of the European Union is that when we do this as the Union, we carry much greater strength, much greater strength when we talk about human rights. So I'm in favour of robustness and nobody else seems to be in favour of questions.
- [41:48]
Damian Chalmers
Oh, no, gentleman, right at the back. Helgeschritte, you mentioned the issue of enlargement and especially Turkey.
- [42:02]
Chris Bryant
But besides problems of human rights issues.
- [42:05]
Damian Chalmers
That are there, there, the conflict in Cyprus and as far as I know you have recently been there. Could you tell something about your impressions and what role that should play in the enlargement process?
- [42:34]
Sian Herbert
Sian Herbert, first, as a general comment, I don't think you can reduce Euroscepticism simply to the idea of false patriotism. Actually, I think a lot of Euroscepticism is rising as a response to democratic deficit of the eu, which perhaps, by the way, that is intriguingly drafted, has made it much more complex for anyone to understand. And also the complexity of how everything works now and the fact there are so many more presidents, everything, it's complicated. Secondly, in reference to the Swift Agreement, I wonder, do you think that the failure to give Parliament the Proper eight week scrutiny period for the Swift agreement which was heavily Criticised today by MPs from both parties, is a poor start to European agreements under the Lisbon Treaty. Especially given that the government has been saying for a long time the Lisbon Treaty would see a stronger role for parliament in the EU decision making.
- [43:28]
Damian Chalmers
One more question gentlemen.
- [43:34]
Unnamed Questioner 2
On the EU enlargement. It's in regards. You mentioned that you're in favor of the enlargement of the western Balkans. What do you think about the idea? I think the Greece ideas that the countries of the western Balkans, they all join as a group rather than individual basis. And when it comes to Kosovo, we all know about the non consensual approach of EU due to the five non recognizers. How does this affect the future prospect of Kosovo? Joining you in this aspect and also the. Isn't this the lack of common use taunts towards Kosovo actually impacting damaging the progress in Kosovo? Like lately we had the latest ICO strategy for the north of Kosovo where as we know mainly it's about improving the rule of law, improving the conditions for the people living there, building local institutions. And we had, we didn't have any support from the eu. We just taken like a neutral program towards that.
- [44:38]
Chris Bryant
Right. Cyprus and Turkey. I could do a long discuss on both of those. Cyprus. Aristotle's definition of a tragedy is it's the reenactment of an event which inspires pity and fear and leads to. To catharsis. And I really feel having visited Cyprus that it feels like a tragedy. There's certainly fear because there are people on both sides of the island who express a real sense of fear if the security that is guaranteed to them and they feel under the present arrangements is taken away. Pity certainly, because there are people who are not able to have access to the homes that they believe are theirs, to the land that their parents, their grandparents, their great grandparents lived in. There are people who have no access to easy trade with the rest of the world. It's a terrible, long lasting problem. But my hope is that the discussions that are going on at the moment between the two leaders on the island will lead to success. And I had dinner last night with a group of Cypriots and everybody kept on going back to 1974 and reiterating arguments again and again and again. I said, look, the truth of the matter is at some point you are literally going to have to let go of history to be able to grab hold of the future. I know that sounds like a trite comment, but I just. It's true in the End. It's like there has to be a degree of reconciliation. Reconciliation, just as there was in South Africa under Nelson Mandela's leadership, or in Argentina after the dictatorship, or for that matter in Spain after the civil war, which rent the party, the country asunder. And we as a country stand ready to help that process. But the solution has to come from the Cypriots, not from Athens, not from Ankara. It's got to come from the Cypriots, because otherwise they won't vote for it. And if they don't vote for it, it's not going to happen. You're absolutely right that there are significant things that need to change in Turkey, and I've been asked quite often about, you know, when Turkey might accede and when Croatia might become a member and so on. I think it's profoundly wrong to set a timetable and then see what changes, reforms in the individual countries have been completed by that time. There's a song in. I apologize to my office because they've heard me use this before, but there's a song in Guys and Dolls. Marry the man today, Change his ways thereafter. You can't do that in the European Union. You can't either. You've actually got to make sure that Turkey has made the changes it needs to, to fully comply with the human rights standards, the trust, the trade standards, environmental standards, labour laws and so on before it joins the Union, rather than set a date. And that's why I'm not in favor of all of the Balkans coming in in one fell swoop, because I think that that's a mistake we've made in the past, that we said, right, all these countries have got to come in at the same time. So we set a timetable and then we just accept what changes you've made, even if you may not have changed enough. So I would much prefer us to enforce the conditionality that the treaty anticipates, that everybody goes through each of the chapters, they reform, so that there is a standard, there's no social dumping across any of the union, and then they have an opportunity to join. You asked a question about which I noticed that you were reading out, which makes me suspect that you. You're a conservative stooge. That sounded like a yes to me, but in particular on Swift or maybe a Lib Dem stooge. Anyway, the point. Look, there is a real problem about the European Union, which is that.
- [48:55]
Donald Davidson
The.
- [48:55]
Chris Bryant
Waves of political thought and of elections don't cast on the shores of each country at the same time. Every meeting I've been to in the European Union, there's a new minister from one or other of the member states, and that ain't going to change. We're not all suddenly going to say, right, we're all going to have general elections on the same date. So, of course, the Union is a complex beast. It's a very complex beast. And I think anybody whose form of pro Europeanism says that we must create a single European political demos, a single political voting Europe, is completely mistaken, because that just isn't going to happen. It just isn't going to happen. But that's a false caricature of a pro European position. My belief is that the European Union is one of the most phenomenal achievements of human politics. It has bound together a continent which has warred so systematically with each other, not just in the last hundred years, but for centuries, far more vigorously than any other part of the world. And that alone, I think, points to the fact that it's a great achievement. Now, yes, there are, you know, most people in Britain, it may be that even Quite a few MPs don't understand the difference between the Council of Europe and the Council of Ministers, or the President of the Council of Ministers, or, you know, don't understand all these things. I think that that matters less than whether or not we have achieved peace across Europe, whether we are extending human rights across Europe, and whether we're extending prosperity across Europe. I think that's the goal on swift, which is something probably most people in the room. This is why I'm very suspicious of you, is because it's a highly technical question that you're asking, and I don't believe that you got that just off your own bat. The reason I'm asking, the issue here is we would like to see a new agreement. We think that it's important to protect our. Security in this country and for that matter, around the whole of the European Union. It's certainly true that the presidency took rather a long time to be able to deliver the documents to the European Parliament. You're talking about the European Parliament, not the British Parliament. And, and I want to. And I've been speaking to members of the presidency today and members of the European Parliament specifically about it. I know that Hillary Clinton spoke to Kathy Ashton about it, and I suspect that there will be some kind of agreement by next week before the European Parliament meets to discuss it. Kosovo, you know, we, I think, are one of the first countries to recognize. The most recent country to recognize Kosovo is Mauritania. I think Tuvalu did as well before Christmas, or is about to. So that's good. I have yet to persuade my Spanish friends of this argument, but we will continue to do so. It'll be interesting to see what the court comes up with, the international court, in the next few weeks, months. I don't know when that will be. But my. I have two instincts about the western Balkans. First, that I have real worries about the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Secondly, that I suspect that what will happen is that dominoes will cascade through the western Balkans, well, throughout the Balkans. So you might get significant change in Macedonia, you might get significant change in Croatia, which then leads to greater change in Serbia and then into Bosnia. And so I don't think they'll all happen at the same time. But it's like this osmosis argument I was using before, that once you've started and it gets to your border, then the EU becomes an infection that you want to catch.
- [53:06]
Damian Chalmers
More questions, gentlemen? Umber.
- [53:14]
Tim Allen
Hi, Tim Allen, a student here. Bob Ainsworth has suggested that.
- [53:20]
Chris Bryant
Whose office? Bob Ainsworth. Yeah.
- [53:22]
Tim Allen
Has suggested that the uk, in future, is going to have to be prepared to work a lot closer with its allies on future missions involving power projection. Do you think? Obviously, we're not going to get too much more detail on this until after a general election and a new defence white paper, but do you think there's a certain inevitability about Britain's renewed commitment to ESDP on the basis of this?
- [53:57]
Chris Bryant
I think two things. First, that I can't think of a situation. I can't imagine a situation in the future where British troops would be fighting on their own. I can't think of one, to be honest. The only kind of situation would be something like the Falklands, and we're determined that's not going to happen again. So I honestly can't see a situation in which we would fight on our own. And our experience over the last few years in Iraq and in Afghanistan and for that matter in Bosnia, is that we have been working very closely with a lot of European allies. I remember when I was in Bosnia a few years ago with the Armed Forces Parliamentary scheme, we were being flown around, interestingly enough, by Swiss helicopters, with Swiss army people wearing a European Union flag on their shoulder. As part of euphoria, the European force, which was rather more successful than its predecessor in Bosnia, we were working closely alongside the Dutch, the French, there are Spaniards there now, the Romanians did quite a lot of our ferrying around as well. And exactly the same is true in Afghanistan. I was really struck last week at the Afghanistan Conference. All the members of the European Union were there, many of them making extra commitments in terms of additional troops, many of them making additional commitments in terms of changing their caveats, the rules under which they engage in Afghanistan, so that they can shoulder more of the burden, to be honest, many of them putting more of the money on the table for the civilian part of the campaign that needs to, we've argued for a long time, needs to accompany the military campaign. And so I think it's absolutely sensible and reasonable that we should work much more closely with our European allies. And sometimes I think we've got two carriers and the French have got one carrier, but we've got. These figures will be wrong, but they're not far out. I think we've got 130,000 personnel and the French have got 170,000 personnel. So I think we've been seeking for a long time for other countries in Europe to match the kind of contribution we make to European security to shoulder more of the burden. I think this is part of it, but equally, we need to be able to be rational about. All right, you've got more planes, we've got more tanks. Let's work together. The Estonian foreigners are. Was telling me the other day that he reckons that his country has the highest proportion of troops in Afghanistan per thousand population in his country.
- [57:00]
Irene Aronzo
Good evening. Irene Aronzo, student here at the events. You have talked about discipline in your talk among the member states, but could you elaborate on which concrete mechanism or procedures we could think of to create that discipline? Provided that. I mean, given that there is. It's not probable that we're going to have qualified majority voting in external affairs.
- [57:30]
Chris Bryant
Well, and I don't want qualified majority voting either for these issues. I think I used to work for the BBC in Brussels, not as a journalist, but as the BBC's lobbyist in Brussels. And I. And I'm toying with telling you a story, but I've decided not to. And when I was there, there were 15 member states. States, and now there are 27. And the biggest difference that I've noticed is that then when I went into a room with all the other member states, I always knew the landscape of opinion. Before I went in, to use George Eliot's phrase, I knew what was going on. And you could pretty much predict how the vote would go. Now, with 27 member states, it's much more difficult to do that because genuinely, a lot of the countries won't have decided. They won't have a particular interest in a subject. And that's Why? I think now there's a real need for more leadership within the Union, in particular from France, Germany and the uk. And that's why one of the things I've been doing over the last few months is work, is meeting very frequently with my French and my German counterparts. We've agreed. Articles, joint articles on the External Action Service, on the elections in Ukraine, second round coming up this weekend, on a whole range of different things. And I think that that's an important thing, an important element of what will come over the years to come. That's not to say that we can tell the rest of Europe what to do, but I think quite often the rest of Europe now looks for a degree of leadership from some of the larger countries. And the advantage of those three countries is that we tend to have rather different takes on different elements. Just as, for instance, our military doctrine in each of those three countries is very, very different. Germany's obviously created in part in response after the Second World War. France is very different from us. So that's one of the things I think that we can contribute to making that discipline work better. And one of the areas that I've already mentioned where I think we have had some successes in relation to Iran, there was somebody else, gentlemen, right at the top. Yeah.
- [59:47]
Matthias
Hi, I'm Matthias, I'm a student here at the European Institute as well. My question is, with regards, you talked a lot about Euroscepticism and in some ways do you think there's a reinforcement of this feeling of Euro skepticism via the exceptionalism which is portrayed in some countries, such as the uk, which has negotiated several opt outs on various European issues? Do you think this is something which reinforces Euroscepticism, or is it something, obviously we get it in the first place because of Euroscepticism to a degree as well?
- [60:20]
Chris Bryant
I think you answered your own question towards the end there, didn't it? It's a kind of chicken and egg. But one of the things I'm trying to say is that whilst I know there's a lot of Eurosceptic rhetoric, and I've done my level best not to be rude about conservatives today, which is really quite difficult, I've lost myself now. I don't think for the most part British people are as xenophobic or as troubled by the rest of Europe as some people would suggest, I know travel doesn't always broaden mind, sometimes it narrows the mind. But I think over the last few years we've seen that British people actually, in many, many different aspects, have become quite simply far more European There can't be many houses in Britain that haven't got some Euros at home, incidentally and people have them and they've not bother to change them back because they know they'll be going back to the Eurozone.
- [61:29]
Damian Chalmers
Chris unfortunately we've sort of run out of time I'd just like to thank Chris Brown for a wonderfully entertaining, rich, thoughtful speech and something that I think you answered the questions directly and fully I mean, on one point I just have to take issue with you which was the false patriotism we have no British football team until the London Olympics I understand it Someone who's been a proud Scot or supporter at least of the Scottish football team I think it was Charlie Miller was a Scot who took football to Brazil We've always seen the Brazilian team as the Scottish second team and that's why we'll be supporting them in the World cup but that aside, it was a wonderful talk thank you very much indeed.