User:Jnestorius/Delors resource wars

Genuine Delors quotes
Jacques Delors

Delors 1991 Alastair Buchan Memorial Lecture
 * The Gulf war has provided an object lesson - if one were needed - on the limitations of the European Community. ... But we cannot limit our horizons to the new Europe. All around us, naked ambition, lust for power, national uprisings and underdevelopment are combining to create potentially dangerous situations, containing the seeds of destabilization and conflict, aggravated by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The Community must face this challenge. ... We need to combine the answers to a series of complex problems: a solution to the tensions caused by the Palestinian and Lebanese problems; a credible guarantee of security for every state; the need to reduce the weaponry which has made the region a giant powder keg; respect for the rights of minorities like the Kurds and the creation of an area of economic development whose fruits can be shared in time by all the people of the region. Today it is the Gulf. Tomorrow, crisis will hit some other part of the world. ... Many need our help, from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe on our eastern flank to the countries of the Mediterranean and the Middle East on what we might call our southern flank. But the Community has wider responsibilities too: it must make a contribution to North-South issues. ... If the Community is to contribute to the new world order, it must accept that this presupposes participation, where necessary, in forces which are given the task of ensuring respect for international law ... the Commission remains faithful to the guidelines set by the European Council in Rome last December, which compiled an initial list of issues of vital common interest in the field of security and defence:
 * - arms control and disarmament
 * - security matters covered by the CSCE and the UN
 * - cooperation on the production, exportation and non-proliferation of arms
 * All that remains then is to press on more resolutely with an arms research and production policy to maximize the cumulative benefits of a common market and a common policy. ... the only question that really matters is  how we see tomorrow's world and what  role  we intend  to play. ... I have deliberately discussed the most sensitive aspects of a common foreign policy, and the most explosive aspects of a common defence policy.

Delors 1993 speech
 * A more  thoughtful analysis of  potential  threats  was provided by Samuel Huntingdon in this summer's edition of Foreign Affairs in  which he predicts that future conflicts will be sparked  by  cultural factors rather than economics or ideology.  This is a conclusion I  fully share.

Attributions of resource-wars quote to Delors

 * It points to our possible direct participation in what Jacques Delors has called "the resource wars of the coming century" — a shameful end surely to Ireland's aspirations to play an honourable international role alongside the neutrals and Third World countries.

Proinsias de Rossa dail/1991-11-29:
 * We have a choice to make at this juncture. On the one hand, the Community may set in motion the development of a defence policy that follows the strategy of pursuing the joining of NATO with the incorporation of the existing nuclear arsenal of France and Britain into the overall Community policy of intervention in developing countries and in preparation for what the EC Commission President, Jacques Delors, has called the resources wars of the next century over oil, water or whatever other commodity is regarded by the European Community as being in short supply. Would that be regarded as one of the "essential interests" that the Taoiseach has decided we must row in to defend? Will we be involved in those wars?

seanad/1991-12-05
 * Brendan Ryan: What are Europe's interests? They are what Jacques Delors called the interests, the wars of resources of the next century, the oil, the natural resources that are scarce in the world and that we will have to defend in our interest.
 * John A. Murphy: I am worried about phrases like "a strike force out of areas" and about Jacques Delors' reference to the wars of the future as being "resource wars".

Adi Roche "Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament: Ireland" 1991 Annual Report, International Peace Bureau, p.15:
 * when we hear Jacques Delors talking about "resource wars" and the protection of the EEC's "fundamental interests" we now begin to see the chilling picture of who the new enemy is...the poor of the world.

dail/1992-05-07
 * Tomás Mac Giolla : Jacques Delors referred to resource wars because the major resources of the world required by western Europe are in Third World countries. ... Our role in the United Nations will gradually fade as we become an integral part of what is becoming, in the words of President Jacques Delors, "the European exploiting force".


 * Cited in
 * Kiberd sees the «resource wars» predicted for the next century by Jacques Delors as wars that will «pit developed Europe against the undeveloped Third World» and asks whether «in that confrontation, should a post-colonial Ireland not support the poor against the post-imperial nations?»


 * p.9 'Good Europeans will not support the building of a European military super state equipped to fight what Jacques Delors has called "Resource Wars" outside its territory in defence of "its common interests".
 * cited in
 * pp.19–20, commentary on Maastricht Treaty Article J.1 §2 "The objectives of the common foreign and security policy shall be: [secondly] to strengthen the security of the Union and its Member States in all ways; ..."
 * Together with the first objective, it permits the Union to engage in what Commission President Jacques Delors has called "Resource Wars" anywhere in the world. "In all ways" echoes the UN mandate given to States prior to the Gulf War "to take all measures" which of course turned out to include warfare and the deployment of nuclear weapons on the battlefront.


 * Maastricht defines the goals of common foreign and security policy in the broadest terms, and could be used to justify foreign interventions, particularly in the third world, where EU 'fundamental interests' would undoubtedly be jeopardised if basic resources were threatened. The outgoing European Commission president, Jacques Delors, has spoken of a future EU army combating such 'resource wars'.

[O'Connor was chair of Democratic Left's International Committee]
 * The "New Strategic Partnership" [adopted by NATO in 1991] abolished the territorial limitation [so that] a hypothetical Russian attack on Denmark is as much [recte no more] a cause for a Nato response as an attack on "Western" oil interests in the Middle East or West Africa (Jacques Delors' "resource wars of the future").

Feargal Quinn seanad/1997-05-08
 * Some years back the President of the Commission, Jacques Delors, said that wars of the 21st century will revolve around resources.

Joe Higgins dail/1997-10-16
 * I am reminded strongly of the words of a previous President of the Commission, Jacques Delors when he referred to the European States being involved in the resource wars of the 21st century.

2002 Leo Dreapir on indymedia
 * The Western European Union (WEU), is the military arm of the European Union. Its maniac destiny, un-baptised in fire, is to fight Jacque [sic] Delors' "resource wars of the twenty first Century", and establish international supremacy.

Seán Crowe dail/2003-02-18
 * Oil is fuelling the drive to war on Iraq. It is a war of aggression and domination. It is in the purest sense what Jacques Delors referred to in 1991 as a 'resource war'.

David Norris seanad 2003-06-25
 * I would put my trust in the United Nations before any European Rapid Reaction Force which might be walked into what a French Prime Minister, with disarming and uncharacteristic honesty, called the resource wars of the next century.

Edward Spalton (Brexiteer) 2004 letter to Daily Telegraph
 * The interlocking cartels of arms companies that Germany and France are funding will equip EU forces "to fight the resource wars of the 21st century", as Jacques Delors put it.

RSF 2005
 * Almost 15 years ago Jacque [sic] Delors spoke about the resource wars which would have to be fought in the 21 Century in pursuit of the EU's political and economic interests, the ongoing Anglo-US led war in Iraq is surely the first of such resource wars which the rich and powerful north is set to wage on the poor and developing south.

morningstar 2010
 * The roots of the EU army go back to the 1980s, when EU commission president Jacques Delors called for a joint military to “fight the resource wars of the 21st century.”


 * When Jacques Delors was President of the European Union he predicted the emergence of “the coming twenty-first century resource wars”


 * cites Patrick Collins "The Economic Benefits of Space Tourism" 2005
 * which cites John Boyd of Campaign Against European Federalism at "Europe for Peace Conference" - Manchester 5 March 2005
 * It was a former Commission President, Jacques Delors who said over a decade ago: “A European Army will be required to fight the resource wars of the 21st century”.

EU Counter Summit Statement London 7th November 2015
 * It was former Commission President Jacques Delors who stated “The EU needs a European Army to fight the resource wars of the 21st Century”.

"The financial cost of signing up to PESCO" People's News No. 178 20 December 2017
 * No doubt as we move closer to a commonly equipped and jointly commanded EU army, and combat situations develop, such as Jacques Delors’ “resource wars of the twenty-first century,” we can expect Irish casualties.

Prodi, says Richard Boyd Barrett
dail 2012-02-07
 * I believe it was Romano Prodi who spoke of the need to be able to fight the resource wars of the 21st century.

dail/2014-01-21
 * We will do the same in Europe, as Romano Prodi put it a number of years ago in a rare moment of honesty - to fight the resource wars of the 21st century, just like we had resource wars at the beginning of the 20th century and again between 1939 and 1945.

Rebuttals of attribution

 * The European Commission office in Dublin statement of 11 June 1992:
 * ...alleged that the Commission President, Jacques Delors, referred to the need to fight 'the resource wars of the 21st century'. ... In response to requests for clarification on this point, President Delors' office today denied that he had ever made such a statement.

Ireland's Foreign Relations in 1992 Patrick Keatinge Irish Studies in International Affairs Vol. 4 (1993), pp. 69-93: 72
 * it was argued that Ireland was committing itself to conscription to a European army which would play an imperialist role in 'the resource wars of the twenty-first century'
 * fn: The quotation, which received considerable currency, was attributed to M. Jacques Delors,  the president of the EC Commission, though it was not established when, or even whether, he said it.

McKenna's case not a Euromyth 15 May 1998, Patrick Smyth:
 * cited on every No platform from Donegal to Waterford during the Maastricht referendum and now resuscitated for Amsterdam. Mr Delors is supposed to have supported proposals to reinforce the defence dimension of the EU with the contention that Europe had to prepare itself for the resource wars of the 21st century. The trouble is that Mr Delors never said any such thing, as his staff in the Commission insisted in a press release in 1992. In a statement last night, Mr Delors said the quote was "completely unfounded. Never, either during my time as President of the Commission or since, have I put forward this, or a similar proposition".

"Pat Nolan" comment on EU Battle Groups — new legislation due to be passed by Government early next month (press release by Roger Cole for Peace and Neutrality Alliance on 27 June 2006)
 * Mr. Cole would prefer Ireland does nothing in these situations and leaves the heavy lifting to others lest his precious holy grail of Irish neutrality is even slightly sullied. Its nothing to so with resource wars in the middle east a canard based on a deliberate misreading of a comment by Jacque [sic] Delors in 1988. The Shannon policy does not affect Irish neutrality which is a policy of not joining military alliances. Stopovers are not military alliances.


 * In June 1992 I spoke at a public meeting in Bray, Co. Wicklow, ... I was confronted by two ladies ... Why ... was I advocating a treaty which ... provided for the conscription of their sons into an aggressive, imperialist European army ... from one of Jacques Delors’ ‘resources wars’. Here were two decent Irish mothers who had been quite cruelly misled in order to frighten them, and their families, into voting ‘No’. ... The Irish Times carried a letter from me arising from that conversation and I was duly rewarded by being named by Anthony Coughlan as the person who brought the subject of conscription into the Lisbon debate!