Eu on the Security Council?
In the next two years Italy wants to use the seat to enforce the Eu common foreign policy
(Unric Magazine, November 30, 2006)Italy’s seat on the Security Council as a non-permanent member for the biennium 2007-2008 stirs interest and curiosity at the United Nations on account of the recurring statements by Italian officials about the government’s will to “put the seat at the disposal of the European Union” in an unprecedented fashion.
During his tenure as President of the Italian Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was the first to float the idea, which the Prime Minister Romano Prodi has been reiterating over the last weeks, in particular on the occasion of his recent visit to Berlin. Marcello Spatafora, the Italian representative to the United Nations, introduced a few details of this novelty referring to a “strengthening of the consultation mechanisms among the EU partners”. However, it is only after 1 January, when Italy officially takes its seat that this new diplomatic approach will take shape and will be tested by the mechanisms of the international diplomacy, which in general tends to reluctantly accommodate to drastic innovations.
As the incumbent President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, explained, the intention at the origin of the Italian initiative is twofold. First: to allow the EU countries that are not sitting on the Security Council – that is all of them but France and UK and the two non permanent members, Italy and Belgium – to direct follow the Security Council’s proceedings and exert their influence on the agenda setting, therefore laying the foundations of a new pillar of the common foreign policy. Second: to strengthen the idea of a more democratic and representative Security Council, and therefore a reform project that is not just limiting itself to increasing by five, six, seven or nine the number of the permanent members, whether they wield a veto power or not. Both the strengthening of the Security Council and a more representative Security Council are objectives that the Italian foreign policy has been pursuing for some time now, regardless of the political color of Rome’s governments, demonstrating a multilateral vocation that is innate in the Italian Republic.
The Security Council’s sessions will tell whether the Italian experiment is successful or not, whether it will allow the European Union to speak with a single voice at the United Nations or if it is rather doomed to failure, allowing the divisions and contradictions that have long undermined the establishment of a common foreign and security policy in Brussels to surface again. But, in any case, this is a bet worth heeding.