Speech of the Minister Vesna Pusić at the Ministerial Conference of the Central European Initiative (CEI)

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I want to use this opportunity to thank you, Minister, and the Austrian Presidency of the CEI and, obviously, your Ministry for organizing this important conference in Vienna.

The CEI as the largest regional forum of Central and Southeast Europe has already proved itself as a constant promoter of common European values, a forum dedicated to fostering mutual understanding and sharing experience, good practices and know-how among the Member States.

Last year, Christopher Clark published a book called “The Sleepwalkers” and I am sure some of you have actually seen and read it, with the subtitle “How Europe went to War”. It is extremely interesting and informative and sometimes also extremely frustrating to read a historical account and analysis of the beginning of WWI.

The Austrian Foreign Minister started with such an invocation. What I want to say is if we are looking for a justification and explanation why regional cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe and in Europe in general is needed and why it is so important, it is all described in this book in detail, and this book is actually a mandatory reading in order to avoid sleepwalking into major disasters in Europe, and especially in parts of Europe known to have done so lately, and this is Central and Southeast Europe. So, regional cooperation is the answer and however banal it may seem, the first objective, no doubt, is to avoid disasters, conflicts and try to lay foundations for prosperous Central and Eastern Europe.

I think maybe a year ago, this might have sounded even more abstract than it sounds today. Today this objective is probably clearer and more realistic since we have – I would say – three common interests: One is cooperation among our countries, the other is accession to the European union for some of the countries that are participating in this cooperation, and the third includes the countries of the Eastern Partnership of which some also overlap with circle number two with the countries that are on their way to closer relations to and maybe future integration into the EU.

Another topic that was just mentioned, that we in Croatia definitely see as an important topic for this type of cooperation, is – and I will start from the other end – the issue of security. The issue of security under today’s circumstances is almost exclusively the issue of energy. Energy cooperation under the circumstances that we are not fully used to, because all of us sitting around this table did not see in our political lives the relationship between Western Europe, or Europe, or European Union or whatever, with Russia deteriorating. It was actually slowly improving, sometimes with hiccups, but over the years, probably from the early eighties or even seventies on, it was constantly improving, and every year was a little better than the year before. And now, in the past few months, we are faced with a situation that we are not quite sure how to react to – finding that the relations have deteriorated yet under completely different circumstances, under the circumstances of great interdependence that in the old days when the relations were bad did not exist. In the meantime, since the seventies, the interdependency between Europe, EU, Western Europe, all of Europe and Russia has increased. Facing the deteriorating relations on one front or one issue, which is Ukraine and the countries of the Eastern Partnership, and at the same time facing interdependency in energy matters is a completely new situation and we are all trying to figure out a way to not say it explicitly but simultaneously to be aware of that problem and the issue we are facing.

Because of that, the cooperation in South East Europe, included Central Europe and SE Europe to the CEI is becoming, I would say, even more important - to put it mildly - potentially exciting area of cooperation, but definitely a very much needed area of cooperation with countries that include EU Member States and countries that are maybe not even looking at it at the moment, including the countries that did not think of themselves as being threatened by energy dependency and then all of a sudden discovered that they were, based on the new expectations in energy cooperation. Consequently, I think that in this sense the Austrian Presidency with its agenda, the key topics that are put on the agenda of its presidency of the Central European Initiative, has actually defined first of all very precisely the most important spots and most important targets that – in order to remain relevant, in order to fulfill its mission - this cooperation or this form of cooperation needs to address. In this respect I take this debate today as a sort of an introductory debate into the Southeast or CEI, Central and Southeast European cooperation as it pertains to energy cooperation, as it pertains to EU reforms and the key basic reforms, facilitating either accession or coming closer to EU membership for some of the countries of Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe, and as our brainstorming from these three aspects. I think we have more experience and share history among us than we care to admit, sometimes maybe too much experience in history, but under the circumstances I think the need has been revived for this type of cooperation and this type of organization which for some time looked a bit like some remnant from the past. The events of the past year or so, I think, revived the importance, so I am using this opportunity to thank the Austrian Presidency for not only convening this meeting but also for defining the points that we will have to focus on in terms of increasing the security of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and everything this entails.

Thank you very much.