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Plea for more European Cooperation · 6 August 2007, 14:39 CET by Charles Vermeulen

In an interview in M (August 2007, pages 10-13), Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad’s monthly, British politician / diplomat Paddy Ashdown states that the United States will turn into a disconcerted and inward-looking country after withdrawing from Iraq. What does this mean for Europe? Ashdown provides the opponents for more European integration in the fields of foreign policy and defence with something to chew on:

"(...) In a time of globalization real isolationism is unimaginable, but we must ask ourselves what a more inward-looking America means to us. An assertive Russia and a more and more assertive China are ready to claim all the room the U.S. leaves open. Because of this Europe will end up in an inconvinient position. The days are really over that we could join with the Americans for our security and involvement in the outside world for free. Add to this that the economic power of the Asian world is growing. As European countries we could respond to this in two ways: by continuing to refuse to attune our foreign and defence policy, or by accepting that the world has changed and by seeking each other’s support and pulling together. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to win the debate about more European cooperation with intellectual arguments – but in a world that is much more chilly for Europe it has taken on a new urgency."

(Note that I had to translate Ashdown’s words from Dutch into English, while the Dutch version of his words is in turn a translation from English into Dutch, because, unfortunately, the Dutch version was the only version that was available to me.)

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