Portugual at the Helm

Portugal takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union today, for the next six months, and has set an ambitious set of goals. One major focus will be combatting illegal immigration, but that will be counter-balanced by efforts to improve relations with the Arab states of North Africa as well as with sub-Saharan Africa. Portugal itself has had close ties with Africa for over 500 years and still enjoys a special relationship with its former colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and Sao Tomé e Principe.

The Portuguese presidency will also have to chair a series of Inter-governmental Conference (IGC) meetings on EU treaty reform, leaading in principle to ratification by the 27 member states — which is bound to provoke some heated debate in the UK. Amongst those reforms (thrashed out in Germany the other day) is a proposed end to the situation in which a different EU state has to shoulder the Union’s presidency every six months. But of potentially greater significance will be Prime Minister José Socrates’s intent to revitalise the 2000 ‘Lisbon Agenda’, which aims to make Europe ‘the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world’ by 2010. Progress on that has so far been limited, but in an increasingly globalised world, in which the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are on the rise, it is of vital importance for our continent’s future prosperity.

Link: www.eu2007.pt