Jim Murphy

Minister for Europe

FCO Logo
« Royal Assent | Main | I'm 10 pounds worse... »
Tuesday 24 June, 2008

French Presidency Preparations

With just a week to go until the French Presidency of the EU kicks off (and the Slovenians get a well deserved summer break) I'm off to Paris this afternoon to see French Europe Minister Jean Pierre Jouyet. We've spoken by phone over the last couple of weeks, as I have to a number of my European counterparts following the Irish No vote, but it's good to see him face to face, and reinforce the UK's support for the French government's work on climate change, migration policy and European defence.
 
I left for Paris straight after Oral Questions from MPs to Foreign and Commonwealth Office Ministers in the House of Commons earlier today. After a debate on the European Council last week, and the PM's statement on it yesterday, it was good to focus on some questions about what the UK and EU are doing to actually help people - tackling human trafficking for example. See what was said in Oral Questions, and other debates in the House of Commons.

Posted at 18:43 24 June 2008 by Jim Murphy  |  Comments[3]

  • Share this with:
Comments:

Out of interest, when ministers head to Paris or Brussels, do they take Eurostar, or do they fly?

Posted by Rich on June 25, 2008 at 10:09 AM BST #

Hi, Jim Murphy – here it may be possible to bypass also problems of Neutrality as defined differently by the four EU-neutrals etc. Right to begin with, even pre-Convention for the Future of Europe, as all accepted one commoned CFSPEU. That in effect seemed to be needed for all its EU member-states. So everyone member-state's Treaty of Nice veto-powers were and remain maintained – control not by the Commission or its President. Hence one solution seems to be, to separate-out and away the EU's ESDP European Security and Defence Policy. However, the EU of all its member-nationstates had/has no need/needs of any commoned ESDP. The EU can agree on re-delegating its ESDP by European Council full membership powers, especially if it limits itself to peace-making, maintaining, and conflict de-escalation for bettered model-competencing all Petersberg Tasks in its macro-regional area of EU interests alone. Also its 'soft power' has then still an achievement in global foot-printing.

Posted by Stefan Peter. on June 30, 2008 at 03:00 PM BST #

Possible solutions after UK media-led sloughs of despond: the EU’s soft power has achievements in humanitarian peace-making by NATO in an extended role under agreed UNO security-writs. We can re-appreciate an ESDI, a then meaningful European Identity in NATO that can/should prove efficiency add-ons in both decision-making and backup military security with EU member-states also in NATO for defence. From those, coalitions of the willing can be formed-up. Some of the EU's NATO members can and will still act in peace-making to restore any lost ‘Human Security’ under histories of friendship. In essence while simplifying Irish neutral-status fears, it leaves unchanged NATO or NATO-new policy-roles. Hence the European Council need not envisage an enforced sharing of risks by NATO’s past decision modes. The EU’s need seems best to become an effective, conflict-efficient, pre-prepared and flexible Lisbon Treaty model. For USA/Canada that begets an exemplar for macro-regional stabilities!

Posted by Stefan Peter. on July 03, 2008 at 04:16 PM BST #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: NOT allowed

Calendar

« November 2009
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
      
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
      
Today

Search

Feeds

Tag cloud

Blogroll

Evaluations

FCO bloggers

FCO partners overseas

FCO websites

UK government websites