Matutes criticises lack of a clearly-defined CFSP

Date: 09/05/1996

By Thomas Klau

IN one of his last moves as an MEP, new Spanish Foreign Minister Abel Matutes has written a highly critical report on the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy, deriding it as largely non-existent, ineffective and confused.

In his draft annual progress report on the Union's foreign policy, the outgoing chairman of the foreign affairs committee chides unnamed member states for allowing “a deep mistrust of highly nationalistic nature” to prevail in their foreign ministries, “making it impossible ... to create a genuine CFSP”.

Listing the CFSP's main failings, the former European Commissioner lashes out against a “lack of specific and clearly defined political objectives, the problem of limited resources, the absence of cooperation between the institutions, the extensive lack of parliamentary control, the lack of foresight and preventive diplomacy, the lack of capacity for analysis, the lack of cohesion between member states within international organisations, and the total confusion between common positions and joint actions”.

Matutes maintains that the instrument most frequently used by the Council to implement the CFSP is declarations. “This is natural, since a declaration normally involves little commitment on the part of the member states,” comments the report.

The reason for the CFSP's many shortcomings, it stresses, is the want of “spirit and political will for integration in this area on the part of some member states”.

In the field of defence, the confusion Matutes diagnoses as the prevailing force in the relationship between the EU and the Western European Union means that “no progress has been made in two-and-a-half years towards defining even a minimum common defence project”.

However, the report does acknowledge that “the overall performance for the year in terms of the Union's foreign relations is by no means bad”. Thus, the EU wins praise for having stepped up its medium-term cooperation with Asia and the Mediterranean, organised the Barcelona conference and signed association agreements with Morocco, Tunisia and Israel.

But Matutes adds: “While not wishing to deny that progress has been made ... it must be said that this is not what European citizens understand by a CFSP and does not represent progress towards the establishment of a Union identity in the outside world.”

While urging the Commission to take a more active role and submit proposals for joint action or common positions, even at the risk of seeing them rejected in Council, the report holds out scant hope of progress, as “the mechanisms of the Council are cumbersome and inefficient”, and “the roles of the European Parliament and the Commission remain ill-defined and unfocused”.

To remedy the CFSP's shortcomings, Matutes urges increased cooperation between member states' diplomatic services and the creation of a joint analysis centre.