Speech by High Representative/Vice-President of the European Commission Federica Mogherini at the Civil Society Days 2017
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Merci Georges [Dassis, President of the European Economic and Social Committee].
Je voudrais vraiment et sincèrement vous remercier pour l'invitation. C'est un plaisir de revenir dans cette salle, pour cette rencontre. Je suis reconnaissante de m'avoir invitée, mais surtout reconnaissante pour le travail que vous faites chaque jour au sein du Comité économique et social, et des organisations de société civile; les plus organisées, les moins organisées à tous les niveaux, que ça soit au niveau de l'Union européenne, que ça soit dans les différentes parties de l'Europe.
Comme tu l'as dit, j'ai commencé mon engagement politique dans la société civile. Je crois que la société civile est l'une des formes les plus actives de participation politique, même si elle n'est pas partisane. Les institutions ont besoin de la société civile pour faire de bons choix et pour les mettre en place, et je sais aussi que la société civile a besoin de bonnes institutions pour pouvoir faire leur travail.
I witch to English; I will focus shortly so that we can have a little bit of an exchange before I will have to leave, to look back to last year. I know you will be dealing with many different and important issues more related to the social and economic agenda of our Union and our daily work on that. I will obviously focus a bit more on the work we do on the external action of our Union and the partnership we have with civil society in this respect.
But I would like to start where you started. Exactly one year ago we were living probably the lowest possible point in the mood but also on the perspectives of our political Union. Exactly one year ago these days we were facing the prophecy of most of the commentators and also the politicians and probably also friends around Europe, saying that the Brexit referendum would have been the beginning of the end of the European Union and that a long series of exits would have taken place immediately after that and that the European Union was about to collapse.
I think that one year after that, as you said, we have seen that we have faced and we are facing challenges – very serious ones – on different issues, from social and economic issues to security issues, to global issues.
But what I see in my daily work, not only here in Brussels but all around Europe is that there has been a real reaction to that; that European citizens first of all, have focused on what there is to lose if we play with fire. Not only 60 years of peace – I think that the celebrations in Rome of the 60th anniversary of the Rome Treaties were giving a clear signal that we stick together and we re-launched the projects for the future 60 years. But also in terms of rights. Because seen from the outside, the European Union is a little bit of an island and this is another problem where human rights, but also socio-economic rights, political rights, are guaranteed in a way that in other parts in the world are not; even if we still have some work to do there, but we are quite in a good place, and we risk to lose a lot.
So, I think that the messages we have seen in this last year, in terms of results of political elections or re-launch of the European Union in some fields of common action, has been somehow the awareness of souverainisme, that the illusion of regaining sovereignty, closing yourself in your borders – national or even local – is actually an illusion and that in the global world in which we are living, the only way to regain sovereignty is actually by living together as Europeans. And the more we look across the Atlantic, the more we realise that, that is quite clear to me.
So, where are we one year after the last time we met in this format?
We have for instance made good steps on acting together as a global power, much more than we have done in the past. There are very significant steps that have been taken on security and defence - these are the most visible ones including last week in the European Council.
But first of all, I would like to stress, especially here in this room, this is not about a militarisation of the European Union. It is a matter of spending better and together, having economies of scale, and also having a certain degree of strategic autonomy in the world of today, having the European way to security which is mainly based on prevention and peace-keeping, and investment in sustainable security – as I call it. But also we have made a lot of progress in acting together in the world on development cooperation, on humanitarian, on multilateralism.
Here I would make the second point. We have managed, I think, to do more in this last year in the field of being a global actor than we have done in the previous years or even decades altogether. And this has been particularly important this year, because this year we have seen that the world has turned towards the European Union looking for a credible, reliable, solid, multilateral partner. This is a trend that I had not experienced before. It is probably linked to the uncertainty that is growing across the world but from Latin America to far East Asia, to Africa. We see our partners looking at us to strengthen the UN system, to uphold humanitarian law, to make sure that human rights are part of every single step we do in foreign policy, to protect rights, to promote the work of civil society or human rights defenders, to make sure that the climate change agreement is implemented and that there is a global network of alliances that supports those actors – state actors and non-state actors – that want to make it a reality to invest in humanitarian aid, to invest in conflict prevention, to invest in peacekeeping, to invest in multilateralism to say it in one word.
And there is this strong need for a predictable, strong, multilateral actor in the world. So it is so much more important today than ever in history that we manage to play our role as we have to, as we should, for our own citizens, but also for our partners.
The third point that I would like to make is what we need to do together. The usual approach is we support your work and this is true inside Europe and for what concerns my institutional competences outside of our borders. Your work outside our borders, the work of your partners outside our borders and we see a shrinking space for civil society sometimes also inside the European Union - and this is something that worries me a lot - but also around our region and beyond. And I have to tell you that this is always part of our work with our partners, even when this is a very difficult issue to raise or to tackle. I will not mention single countries, but you can easily imagine all of them. The role of civil society organisations, the role of human rights defenders, the role of human rights in resilience and in strengthening the countries is always at the top of the European agenda because we know, first of all, that it is our value. But we also know that no society is strong if it is not based on being an open society, a participatory society. This is the European experience, so what we discuss with our partners is always this: it is an investment in your own stability, if you manage to make the society work, if you open up spaces of participation. Because we do not invest in strong men – then it is always strong men, never strong women - but we invest in strong and open societies, otherwise resilience is fake and it is going to collapse maybe six months later. This is our approach, but to me it is not just a matter of how do we support the work of the civil society. For me it is how we partner to make things work better in the world.
I give you a couple of examples, mainly one for the sake of time: Syria, which is not an easy example. But it is one of the cases where I strongly believe that the civil society inside Syria and outside Syria can help us enormously even to find a political diplomatic agreement. The example I'm going to give you is that we had in April an international conference on Syria, a major ministerial conference with [UN Secretary General, António] Guterres, opening it with me. And all ministers of around 70 delegations around the world not only recommitted to humanitarian aid but also listened to the suggestions of the Syrian civil society on the way forward for national reconciliation and eventually reconstruction of the country.
That happened the day in which we were facing the awful chemical attack in the province of Idlib. And I was meeting with civil society representatives, people who were travelling from Syria to Brussels, people who had lost in those very same hours friends and colleagues because of the chemical attack, sitting around the table, men and women, different political backgrounds, different religious backgrounds, representing the diversity of Syria, coming from the inside of the conflict areas, telling us that first and foremost what Syrians needed was a political solution, having experienced the very same day losses, bringing to the political table a wisdom that sometimes politicians do not have.
What I am saying is that we do not need just to have the institution supporting the civil society, we need the civil society supporting good ideas for political solutions. Because the contribution that people working on the ground can bring to the political processes is sometimes underestimated. And I am convinced that sometimes the key to solutions is exactly there – in the work you do.
This is true for conflicts like this and we are going to continue to work with the Syrian civil society, on financing and implementing projects locally, to facilitate local processes of reconciliation to rebuild the fabric of the society. This is something you cannot do from the outside or from the above – you have to do it from within.
But also on some other – well, also in all the other conflicts we have around, or post-conflict work we do. From Iraq to Libya, from Afghanistan to Colombia, our key interlocutor is always the civil society organisations.
But also on some other major issues. I think of migration – a sensitive field. We were together the other day in the European Parliament expressing very similar points of view in this respect and I know that on this we are on the same side and I will finish with this point.
I have myself felt sometimes not perfectly at ease when we started to work – first of all, I did not feel perfectly at ease, and this is an euphemism, when I was seeing that migration was not tackled as a European issue for many many years. Then, I did not feel completely at ease in the way we started to deal with this. You might remember two years ago, the entire focus was on border management and control. I think that today we are finally on the good track.
With a lot of work that needs to be done, a lot of things that still need to be changed – and here the role of NGOs and civil society is extremely precious- to understand what works, to understand what does not work and also to work together on the field.
But finally, we are on the path of partnership with the countries of origin and transit and with the international organisations, IOM [International Organization for Migration], UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees], and with the international NGOs. With the principles, with the objectives – and we discussed this at length – of saving lives, protecting persons, fighting criminal organisations and smugglers and most of all promoting alternative economies and investments.
And here we will have, I believe, in the coming couple of months the European Investment Plan for the external action, that will focus mainly on Africa, ready to accompany private investments in the most fragile countries on the basis of the Sustainable Development Goals. So, mobilising private sector financing for purposes that are linked to our sustainable development agenda – not specifically mentioning migration, but at the end of the day we know very well the root causes are lying there, climate change, economic injustice and inequalities, an uneven system of development in the world that we need to tackle and it is all in the UN-agenda at the end of the day.
Touching one issue where I would need really your help – if I can make an appeal; then I am ready to get all the appeals you want to address to me. But I would need, I think we need, to strengthen our partnership on one issue. There is a taboo in Europe – there are many, but one of those that I suffer the most is this: we sometimes act as if we did not see that Europe needs migration. For economic reasons first of all, but also for cultural reasons.
We are less than others at a crossroad, but we have experienced in our history – and I come from a country that makes it self-evident – the need for people to move. Sometimes they move and then they move back. It is the way in which we have lived. I know that you have worked in the last years on a report on the cost of non-Europe. Why do you not work on a study or a report on the costs of non-migration?
Because my impression is that sectors of our economies would collapse the day after if we were to have all migrants disappear from one day to the other. And I think that it would be a useful voice – that of civil society, including economic and social actors - imagining what Europe would look like if all migrants were to disappear tomorrow. I think we need to build a little bit of awareness of the positive, of the value – not only in terms of cultural diversity, but also in terms of practical economic life.
And this might help us opening another issue that is a taboo: the work we have to do on regular channels of migration. Because we focus a lot on avoiding people loosing lives in the hands of smugglers and traffickers – and this is a humanitarian priority – but I think we also have the responsibility to open regular channels for people to come to Europe in a sustainable, human and regulated way.
So, basic bottom line is that I believe we need each other. Across the institutions I feel a strong need to have a strong civil society partnership with you, in a win-win cycle. The stronger the civil society is inside Europe and outside Europe, the stronger societies are, the more open societies are, the stronger institutions become and democratic processes become. And the other way around: strong open institutions, democratic institutions, need the active participation of citizens and the role you are playing inside Europe and, again, outside Europe is key in this respect.
So count on us and me personally to continue, as you said, to be not only playing an institutional role but also remembering which are the roots of getting here – and maybe going back at a certain moment again, because you can take part to a public life in different roles, to civil society organisations. And count on us inside and outside of the European Union to protect and promote the space for active participation of citizens – being it in the field of human rights, being it in the field of social and economic rights, being it in the field of democracy and the rule of law, being it in the field of bringing forward our global agenda that coincides very much with – again I would like to stress it – the multilateral UN system.
I thank you very much and continue to count on you as key partners for our external and global action in the world.
Thank you.