Gianni De Michelis (NI). – (IT) Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to express my support for the European Union’s initiative in the Lebanese situation, which means that we are once again playing a central role in Middle Eastern affairs in a way that we have not seen for a long time, and, of course, it also coincides with the failure of the unilateral initiatives adopted by others.

Everything will depend on the outcome, however, and we have to realise that the military mission and aid for reconstruction are not the finishing line but the starting point, not an end but a means and, it must be said, a means that is liable to be totally inadequate if it is not quickly and promptly backed up with a political and diplomatic initiative aimed at restarting the talks between the two sides.

Our debate here in Parliament should focus above all on that: the context will be the United Nations Security Council, but the initiative must inevitably come from here, from Europe, the European Union, in liaison with the United States and with the Arab League, but the central initiative being ours.

We must debate the implications that such an initiative may have. The experience of recent years and months has shown that unilateralism by itself leads nowhere, that the attempt to solve the problems of the Middle East piece by piece leads nowhere. We need to go beyond the roadmap, beyond the specific individual Security Council resolutions on Iraq or Lebanon, and realise that the time is ripe right now for an all-encompassing approach that can somehow get all the countries involved in the region to sit down around a table for formal talks on all the unresolved issues, crisis points or areas of cooperation.

We in Europe ought to know something about that because, 30 years ago in Helsinki, we succeeded in laying the foundations for that transformation that then astounded the world a few years later. A solution of that kind would be a solution for everyone: for the United States, which would get out of a tight corner; for Israel, which would escape from the unilateralism in which it is trapped; for the Arab League; and most of all for us, for Europe, because in that way we could revitalise the Barcelona process and Europe’s own situation at the same time.