On 7-8 March 2019 took place in Bucharest the Inter-parliamentary Conference on Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CFSP / CSDP). Its goal was to provide a platform for the exchange of information and good practice between national parliamentary committees of the Member States that work in the field of foreign, security and defence policy, the European Parliament, and the European Commission.
The main objectives of this conference were to strengthen security, ensure peace, promote international cooperation and develop democracy. This event brought together up to six members of each national parliament and up to 16 representatives of the European Parliament.
The first meeting in this format was held in 2012, in Cyprus. Since then, the event has been organized twice a year in the Member State holding the rotating Presidency of the EU Council.
At the Bucharest reunion were addressed topics such as the Eastern Partnership, the strategic importance of the Black Sea on the EU agenda, military mobility, the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), the EU Strategy for the Danube Region, cyber security and hybrid warfare and a credible prospect for enlargement and a strengthened EU commitment to the Western Balkans.
The event enjoyed a high level participation of both Romanian and European officials. The opening speech of the Conference by the President of the Senate, Mr. Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu, presented the key lines of the Romanian message: the need of “cohesion and solidarity rooted in a shared vision for the future.” In his opinion “this vision is gradually losing coherence and the policies painstakingly put in place to support it start losing their sense of purpose in the aftermath of several recent crises that have shaken our societies” while we are dealing also with “the challenge of legitimacy of the current European Commission”.
The Final Statement of the conference reviewed the main aspects discussed underlining that “the time has come for the EU to develop a genuine common foreign and security policy (CFSP) to promote its interests, principles and values in the face of increasing challenges, notably in its neighbourhood.”
For more details please visit http://www.parl2019ro.eu/eu/dp.events?id_evn=4&idl=2#stiricomunicate
This material was first published in the EIR Newsletter no. 96 – March 2019