Examination of Witnesses (Questions 226
- 239)
TUESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2000
RT HON
ROBIN COOK
MP, MR EMYR
JONES PARRY
CMG AND MR
KIM DARROCH
Chairman
226. First, Foreign Secretary, the good news
is I hope you have learnt that "Foreign Affairs" won
the 1.05 at Wolverhampton, and I hope too in the course of your
busy day you were able to do the necessary.
(Mr Cook) Sadly, no, but I am sure it is an omen for
the future.
227. Foreign Secretary, we welcome you, we welcome
Mr Emyr Jones Parry, who is the Political Director of course,
and Mr Kim Darroch, Director, European Union. You know, of course,
that we have this meeting before every European Council and one
of the advantages of this is that our meetings help to inform
subsequent debates in the House of Commons. The debate in the
Chamber will be on Thursday. I understand that the transcript
of this meeting will be in the Vote Office tomorrow morning and
on the internet about noon tomorrow, so it will hopefully be of
assistance to parliamentary colleagues in terms of their preparation
for that debate. The position in terms of the Nice Council, Foreign
Secretary, is this, that, yes, it is the left-overs of Amsterdam,
and it is the essential pre-requisite to enlargement. We, both
the Prime Minister and yourself on behalf of the Government, have
shown great enthusiasm for enlargement, not least in the Prime
Minister's Warsaw speech. In that speech he, without naming names,
was critical of those who indulge in grand declarations of enlargement
without following it through into the detail of policy decisions.
Is it your view that the enthusiasm of this Government is shared
by other Governments?
(Mr Cook) Yes, I think it would be fair to say that
is true. I think in practical terms we have perhaps been of value
during the negotiations, partly because we are the least protectionist
of the states and therefore tend to be willing to sign up to the
most generous terms for the applicant countries; partly also because
we attach great significance to the security of Central and Eastern
Europe and we understand embracing the new democracies there into
the European Union will help to underpin that security; partly
because we ourselves have formed very good, strong friendships
and alliances with those countries. I do not think you will find
a single one among the applicants who do not recognise Britain
as a friend and an ally.
228. But there is a difference between acceptance
in principle and the readiness to make the necessary concessions
in terms, for example, of competition and agricultural policy,
concern about an influx of workers in competition. Is it your
fear that there will be such hesitations and that the timetable
at Nice will be held up?
(Mr Cook) No. I would very much expect partners to
come to Nice seeking to reach an agreement on the Intergovernment
Treaty amending the existing Treaty in order to pave the way for
a European Union which can function with a larger membership.
I do not think any partner would come there in order to prevent
that from happening. The two points you touch on are two of the
reasons why we are natural allies of the applicants. The first
is we are one of the strongest advocates of reform and modernisation
of the Common Agricultural Policy and we see enlargement as naturally
increasing the urgency with which that must be tackled. Secondly,
on the question of the free movement of people, we are possibly
less immediately exposed because we are further away than some
of our partners from the new members. At the same time, we have
vigorously argued, and it is my own strong belief, that if we
actually want to tackle the issue of migration which gives rise
to some popular concern in some countries, the better way to do
it is to bring these countries into the European Union, enabling
them to share our prosperity and enabling them to have the prospect
of a career and a job and a future within their own country. That
was the experience with Portugal, and as a result of Portugal's
membership there are now fewer people from Portugal working elsewhere
in the Union than there were before Portugal became a member.
229. I would like to turn to the European Security
and Defence Initiative and call Sir John Stanley, but one final
question on this introduction. If all goes well at Nice, there
is the Nice Treaty, that Treaty will have to be ratified, at least
some of the countries, like Ireland and Denmark, may need a referendum,
it will presumably be three months before the Treaty is completed
in proper legal form subsequent to Nice. If that is the case,
what can you say about the ratification process in this country,
that it may well be that the formal legal document will not be
available prior to perhaps a May election in this country? What
is your expectation about the likely ratification process in this
country?
(Mr Cook) For the benefit of the press, I should perhaps
say that no May election has been announced and I am not going
to answer the question in a way that suggests there will necessarily
be a May election. Our position is that we will seek ratification
as soon as is practical. First of all, we have to have, as you
precisely say, the legal text, and then there will be a signing
ceremony which will follow some time after Nice. Thereafter, when
that text is signed and ready to be put before the House, we will
put it before the House as soon as we can.
Chairman: I would like to turn to the ESDI.
Sir John Stanley
230. Foreign Secretary, in the last few days,
as we know, the EU Member States have announced their force commitments
to the ESDI. As far as the UK is concerned, of course, all our
armed forces are already committed to NATO. The question I would
like to put to you first is this, in the event of a commitment
of part or all of the armed forces that we are allocating to the
ESDI to an operation elsewhere in the world, and that commitment
has taken place, if following that deployment NATO finds itself
with an imperative need to deploy its own forces, who will take
the decision as to whether the British forces remain committed
to the ESDI deployment or are recalled to take part in the NATO
deployment?
(Mr Cook) The British Government.
231. Can you therefore give me an assurance,
and the rest of the Committee, that if such an eventuality arose,
the right of the British Government to recall these forces without
notice, without any delay, to take part in a NATO operation in
preference to the ESDI operation, is wholly untrammelled and unqualified
and is absolute?
(Mr Cook) Yes.
Sir John Stanley: Thank you.
Mr Rowlands
232. Foreign Secretary, just to clarify what
I think so far have been the statements which have been made,
these decisions would be by unanimity, by consensus, to commit
the forces?
(Mr Cook) To commit the forces, yes. Once the forces
were committed, the management of the operation would be taken
in the hands of those who are participating in the operation,
not in the wider European Union. In other words if a country,
for whatever good reason, did not commit a force it would then
not participate in the management of the forces. Can I confirm
I have that precisely right?
(Mr Jones Parry) The decision to launch the operation
is one that the 15 would take by unanimity. The decision as to
whether or not British troops should in any way be involved in
it, is absolutely for the British Government and the British Government
alone. Then what happens afterwards is what the Foreign Secretary
has said.
233. I think in an earlier session we had, when
this issue was first raised, one of us—perhaps I did—asked
you whether frankly, however substantial this rapid deployment
force is going to be, without American assent or support it was
highly unlikely there would be any effective ability to launch
this force, and we asked about Kosovo and Bosnia for example and
if both those situations were re-run, would this new European
defence force be capable of acting on its own without American
logistic support or assent?
(Mr Cook) First of all, we have put immense effort
into working with NATO to make sure that we can get access to
the common NATO assets which we have all jointly created within
NATO. Much effort has gone into that and considerable progress
has been secured with it, and you will have seen the letter from
George Robertson in the Telegraph this morning. Now we
would anticipate that if there was a major operation, then that
major operation would draw upon central NATO assets for planning
to make sure we could launch a successful operation. To be candid,
I do not think a major operation could be mounted without those
NATO assets. At the present time, we have no reason to suppose
in those circumstances the United States, or any other NATO ally,
would withdraw its consent for the use of those common assets.
Do remember here that we have quite explicit statements in all
the key documents relating to the European Security Initiative
that we will only launch a European-led operation where NATO as
a whole is not involved, in other words the kind of operation
that you are contemplating would only happen if NATO itself had
decided not to launch such an operation, presumably because the
US itself did not wish to be involved. In those circumstances,
we would expect there to be a presumption in the United States,
not wishing to take part itself, to facilitate the use of the
common NATO assets so that somebody could do it.
234. It would require US consent for any NATO
assets to be deployed?
(Mr Cook) Insofar as the United States is a member
of NATO, yes, just as it would require the consent of other NATO
allies like Norway who are not members of the European Union.
235. You slightly beg the question in the use
of the word "major". How do you define what is minor
and major in those circumstances?
(Mr Cook) I would not attempt to define it by hard
and fast rules, but let me take three cases in the Balkans which
might illustrate it. First of all, I do not think anybody would
be seriously contemplating the EU-led operation replicating what
happened in Kosovo, that was a conflict, and indeed, as the Prime
Minister said this morning, we are not contemplating this EU force
participating in a conflict, it is there for humanitarian intervention
and peace-keeping operations. Conversely, at the other end of
the scale, you will recall in the mid-90s there was a state of
anarchy in Albania in which the military forces and police forces
broke down. On that occasion it was impossible to find an institution
willing to mount an institutional response to that, and in the
end there was a coalition of the willing led by the Italians.
This could well be an example where had this EU possibility been
present at the time of Albania, the EU could have mounted that
and we would have had a much more effective and immediate and
rapid response because we are dealing with an existing structure.
I think Bosnia comes in between those two. It is quite possible
that if we had available to us a core strength of 60,000 rapid
reaction forces we could have committed it in Bosnia during those
years in the early 90s when the United States were not willing
to be present on the ground, and possibly had we been able to
do so massacres like Srebronica might not have taken place.
Mr Rowlands: May I finally ask you about the
very strong words used by the Prime Minister in his Warsaw speech?
I understand how we have wanted a better co-operation with the
European Union to exercise political influence, but the words
in his speech, if I could just read them to you, sound very different
from just that. "Whatever its origins, Europe today is no
longer just about peace, it is about projecting collective power."
Now any layman would suggest that means projecting military power
and that links to the reference to the super state.
Chairman: Super power.
Mr Rowlands
236. There is little wonder the media distort
things and put those two things together and say that this is
all part and parcel of the development of a military arm to the
whole of the European Union.
(Mr Cook) Let us be quite clear, as the Chairman was
pointing out, that the Prime Minister did not say that he wanted
Europe to be a super state, he did talk about super power but
not a super state.
237. Super power.
(Mr Cook) On the question of the military role here,
if we look back over the crises of the past decade, and we have
tragically seen too many of them in South East Europe over that
decade, the military role was a very important role in making
sure that one could restore, establish and sustain peace.
238. That was done by NATO.
(Mr Cook) By NATO in some cases. In Albania by a coalition
of the willing. In the case of Bosnia it was actually not done
initially by NATO, it was done by the UN mandating a force, UNPROFOR,
in which many European nations took part but the Americans did
not. The central point is there in that given a state of insecurity
and instability the military had a very powerful part to play
in restoring stability and in maintaining that security. This
does not mean that we are going in any way to contemplate an outright
conflict but where there is insecurity, where there is instability,
if we want to have an EU capacity to restore the peace then we
have to have the capacity to project a military force.
239. So it is about projecting collective power
that was anticipated in this kind of development that we have
seen?
(Mr Cook) Yes. The Prime Minister has been utterly
explicit on many occasions that we do not see the European Union
as the instrument of collective defence. We have always said and
repeatedly said that that is a job for NATO and nothing that has
happened in European security is going to undermine that central
role of NATO and NATO is the sole provider of that collective
defence.
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