"Moving in the right direction"

Strasbourg, 31. March 2004

Ladies and gentlemen,

The process of European integration began life as a peace process. In half a century the objectives of peace have been developed and consolidated, while the world around us has undergone profound changes.

Today all the members of our united Europe share certain underlying principles. Membership of the Union means:
- upholding the fundamental rights of the individual,
- organising public life democratically and in accordance with procedures, and also
- building and defending our model of economic and social development.

Recently I have often thought about these principles while reflecting on the challenges facing our Union, both from within and from outside, partly because in the face of such terrible threats we are striving to find points of reference.
The European Council that concluded in Brussels last Saturday followed the same line of thought. As you know, the spring Council is the focal point of the economic governance of the Union. However, recent events basically rewrote our agenda.

First and foremost, of course, the Madrid bombings of 11 March led the Council to adopt a series of measures to safeguard our security against the threat of terrorism.

The attack was against defenceless citizens. Once again, our first thoughts go out to them and the families of the victims.

But the fallout from the bombings affected all Europeans. It touched us all personally and also affected our civil and political institutions.

The threat of terrorism is the most serious challenge to the democratic and civil principles that govern public life and to societies based on respect for human rights, personal freedom and the rights of minorities since the end of the Second World War.

I am delighted to be able to tell you that the Council has decided to respond to this threat with the greatest resolve.

The Declaration approved in Brussels leaves no room for doubt: the Member States of the European Union have moved as one, with the shared objective of wiping out terrorism.

I am extremely pleased about the measures to coordinate and unify intelligence gathering, police and security systems that were adopted last week.
At this stage, we must achieve the best level of coordination of human and technical resources possible. At this point in our history it was not possible to set up a single European security agency.

However, I am convinced that this is but the first step towards ever-deepening integration. Looking ahead, the objection will be to create common operational structures at European level.

But the most important thing is that we Europeans have understood that force alone will not defeat terrorism. We need force but we also need the intelligence to understand and resolve its underlying causes.

Alongside the military and enforcement option we need to pursue a political strategy with equal determination. And both approaches need to be pursued on a multilateral basis: unilateral methods no longer suffice.

The entire speech is available (in pdf) on-line at:
http://europa.eu.int/rapid/start/cgi/guesten.ksh?p_action.getfile=gf&doc=SPEECH/04/167|0|RAPID&lg=EN&type=PDF