Álit: tímarit löggiltra endurskoðenda - 01.01.1993, Page 11

Aneurin Rhys Hughes, ambassador.
THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA FROM THE
ECSPOINT OF VIEW
Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Thank you for the invitation, but before I start to
address the theme you asked me to, let me make a
couple of apologies. The first is that unlike you, and
the other speakers here today, I am an original non-
expert. Anybody who has taken one degree in
Welsh and Celtic studies, followed up with pure
philosophy, can only claim to be an occasionally
philosophic Welshman. The second apology is of
course that Welshmen usually have a theme. They
are like your old ministers of religion, they take a
verse from the New or the Old Testament, then they
preach with three points and end up with a stirring
appendage, urging you to some form of reaction or
retraction. I am going to quote, as maybe a theme
for my remarks, a Scottish poet some of you will
have heard of, Robert Bums. Even we and the
English have difficulty in following Robert Bums,
so I will translate. And the theme that I would
address, is summed up in his words: “The best laid
plans of mice and men.” Meaning that whatever you
planned, even in meticulous detail, like the
conference today, there could be some little
accident which blows it all up into the air. Any
conference organizer will appreciate those
difficulties. Or of course, I thought I might use
another saying in English, which was that “the road
to hell is paved with good intentions.” As some of
you in the audience would no doubt comment on
the Althingi's marathon session as far as the EEA is
concemed. Now, I will go back a little bit. When
the EEA was first but a gleam, in perhaps President
Delors' eye, it was thought, I think at that time to be
a good idea, perhaps to prevent Austria putting in
an application for membership of the European
Community. Or some thought it was rather a good
idea, because if you looked objectively at the
relationships that had been established between the
EFTA countries and the EC with backgrounds of
very close similarity, it was quite ridiculous, that
they could amount to no more than free trade
associations. Of course the problem with ideas is
that they tend to develop a life of their own. I think
it was Victor Hugo who said on one occasion:
“More mighty than a march of armies, is an idea
whose time has come.” And interestingly enough, I
would argue that just as the creation of EFTA, led
by the UK and the Stockholm Agreement, was a
reaction to the development of the European
Community, so in a sense, the EEA can be regarded
as EFTA'S reaction, initially at least, to the
European Community’s drive for the creation of an
intemal market, free of all obstacles. And to benefit
from that market without the problems and
encumbrance of full membership. But this quixotic
little germ, or vims or idea, of course produced a
complete paradox. In that once we started going
into the EEA negotiations, the effect on at least five
of the EFTA govemments was that the EEA
perhaps was insufficient, to meet their purposes and
that they had to apply for full membership. Of
course that is only partially true, because in the
intervening time from that idea which flashed with
Delors, and then was picked up by Mrs Brundtland
and the other heads of govemment at the Oslo
meeting, the world had changed. Berlin had become
the capital city of Germany, the last of the Soviet
empire had more or less disappeared, we had
another civil war on Europe’s terrain, and all the old
certainties that we had grown up with no longer
prevailed. We were living in a new age of
considerable ambiguity. And of course part of that
ambiguity still pertains to the EEA today. And let
me make a comment about the delay that we have at
the moment. No doubt other speakers will address
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