Ambassador's Corner

WEEKLY MESSAGE FROM AMBASSADOR JOHN BRUTON

May 12, 2009

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison

Last week I met Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican Senator who is the first, and so far the only, woman elected to the Senate from Texas. She comes from an old Texan political family. Her Great-Great-Grandfather, Charles Taylor, was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence of Texas when Texas separated itself from Mexico and became a fully sovereign and independent country before eventually deciding to become a State of the United States.

Her first political advance came in 1976 when she was appointed to the National Transportation Safety Board by President Ford. She became State Treasurer of Texas in 1990 and was elected to the Senate in 1993. She serves on the Appropriations Committee, the Banking Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, she has been able to secure substantial funds for Texas.

In her private career, Kay Bailey Hutchison has worked as a broadcast journalist, a lawyer and an executive of a bank. She told me she has enjoyed visiting Ireland and has taken part in hunting in County Limerick many times.

My discussion with her focused on European Union worries about some parts of the proposed Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) renewal legislation now before Congress. It contains new restrictions on overseas investment in American airlines, on alliances between airlines, and artificial penalties for having aircraft maintenance done outside the United States. The EU believes that these protectionist measures would increase the running costs of airlines and thereby undermine their profitability and airline jobs. They would also hamper the implementation of the first stage Open Skies Agreement negotiated between the European Union and the United States and impair the ability to liberalize the transatlantic aviation market further, which is the objective of ongoing negotiations.

Geoff Hoon, UK Secretary of State for Transport

This topic was also addressed in discussions I had with the Secretary of State for Transport of the United Kingdom, Geoff Hoon. I have known Geoff for many years. He is the MP [Member of Parliament] for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire and was previously a Member of the European Parliament and Secretary of State for Defence of his country.

Geoff Hoon is a strong supporter of the efforts to open up the aviation market across the Atlantic and, in a speech while here in Washington, he said that he wanted to see stage 2 of the EU-US Open Skies negotiations completed by June 2010. He said that we now live in a world where international investment is the norm and that investment restrictions of the kind that exist in the US aviation industry, and that would be made more severe under the draft FAA legislation, are out of line with that norm.

Addressing the fear that liberalizing the aviation industry might lead to an erosion of services to smaller airports, he said that the European experience had been precisely the opposite. Liberalization had led to the development of low-cost airlines and to more services to secondary airports. Overall, there are 170% more city-to-city connections in Europe now than there were prior to liberalization.

Senator Thad Cochran

Last week I also met Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Like Kay Bailey Hutchison, he is a member of the Appropriations Committee and has been able to steer very large flows of funds into Mississippi, which has one of the lowest incomes per head in the United States. He is also a member of the Agriculture Committee.

He was first elected to the Senate in 1978, becoming the first Republican to hold a Senate seat in Mississippi since reconstruction after the end of the Civil War.

Thad Cochran received his university education mainly at the University of Mississippi where he studied both psychology and international law, but he also studied international law for a year in Trinity College Dublin, which he told me he liked very much indeed. He returned there recently with his wife, Rose, to renew friendships.

The rise of India

I attended a lecture given by Nandan Nilekani, who is the Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors and founder of Infosys Technologies, an outstandingly successful Indian multinational company. He is a member of the National Knowledge Commission of India.

He gave a lucid explanation for recent rapid economic growth of India. He said India had advanced from a growth rate of 3.5% a year in the 1980s, to one of 8% today, because six basic ideas had been accepted by the Indian people, namely:

• India came to see its growing population as an asset rather than a burden.

• It now celebrates entrepreneurship rather than statism.

• It accepts that new technologies create new jobs rather than simply replace old ones.

• It values the English language as an asset rather than a colonial hangover.

• It embraces globalization, and

• Democracy had become a value system embedded in the minds of the entire population of India rather than just the educated elite as it was at the outset.

Looking to the future, he said that India had recognized that its primary education system had failed and was in need of radical reform. It also accepted the need to invest in its infrastructure and that urbanization was part of its future (in contrast with the traditional Gandhian viewpoint, which idealized rural living).

He drew attention to the demographic dividend that is now available to India. It has a large, young population, many of whom are very well-educated and are contributing to the growth of knowledge-based industries.
 
The Middle East Peace Process

Coming weeks will see intensive diplomatic activity here in Washington to advance the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians and Arabs more generally. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is one of the longest running military occupations in history, dating back to 1967.

The international community supports the creation of a Palestinian state capable of living in peace beside Israel. But this requires that there be a Palestinian Authority strong enough to enforce security within its own borders.

That can only happen if Palestinian institutions have a chance to develop and build both administrative expertise and physical infrastructure. For that to happen, the Palestinian economy must be allowed to grow. The restrictions imposed on the Palestinian economy by the Israeli occupation, particularly in recent years, make it very difficult for the Palestinian economy to develop sufficient autonomous strength to support a state. Gaza is under a complete blockade, and numerous restrictions also make Palestinian economic activity in the West Bank seriously uncompetitive.

The difficulties encountered by Palestinians were brought into high relief by a report published last week by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The report concerned the situation in Bethlehem. Bethlehem is a Palestinian territory that has been under Israel occupation since 1967. In 1993 a general closure was imposed by the Israeli authorities, which require residents of Bethlehem to get permits to enter nearby East Jerusalem.

The UN report shows that only 13% of the Bethlehem governorate’s 255 square miles of territory is open to use by its 175,000 Palestinian residents. Two-thirds of the remaining land in the governorate is designated under Israeli control and accommodates 86,000 Israelis in settlements and outposts created by Israel since 1967 in this occupied territory. Twenty percent of the remaining land is in an Israeli-controlled nature reserve. A separation wall, erected by Israel, restricts Palestinian access to grazing and agricultural land.

There is controversy about the legality in international law of introducing Jewish settlements into the occupied West Bank. Paragraph 6 of Article 49 of the IV Geneva Convention says that:

 “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

This is the situation in an area that would inevitably become part of a Palestinian state, if a two-state solution is ever to be viable.

The impact of restrictions like these on Palestinian public opinion is one of the factors that will undoubtedly have to be taken into account by President Obama as he works towards a comprehensive settlement that would give both Palestinians and Israelis the peace, security and mutual respect that are each essential to one another and to both communities.

Making it less expensive to call someone in the European Union on their mobile phone

EU Commissioners Viviane Reding [on left, Information Society & Media] and Neelie Kroes [Competition] took an important initiative last week to make it less expensive to phone someone on their mobile phone in Europe. Their plan is to introduce some uniformity and more competition in the rates charged by the operators of telephone networks for connecting calls received by their customers on their fixed or mobile phone when the call comes from another operator’s network (which are rather confusingly known as “termination rates”).

They say mobile charges in particular vary widely within Europe, ranging from as low as 2 cents a minute in Cyprus to 8 cents a minute in Germany and 15 cents a minute in Bulgaria. All of these charges are much higher than those levied for connecting to a fixed line, which is as little as 1 cent a minute.

Commissioners Reding and Kroes are recommending that all national telecom regulators in the EU Member States set these charges at a level that reflects actual costs and not the exercise of monopoly power. They praised France for measures it had recently taken to bring rates down to the costs of an efficient operator and hoped that this best practice would be followed by other EU Member States.

Please send me your comments about this or any of my weekly messages or other EU matters. I look forward to hearing from you!