Ambassador's ASEF speech

"H. E. Ambassador Morikawa Toru, ASEF Executive Director, H. E. Ambassador Ng Teck Hean, ASEM Senior Official and Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, distinguished guests, dear young journalists,

The subject of my speech today is one major issue: how to bring together in the media space two different continents whose countries have different histories, cultures, political structures and face different challenges due to their geographical location? How to bring together people from countries that face monsoons, floods and earthquakes, and thus quite naturally behave, think and build their countries differently from those who live in places where they are not so far threatened by natural disasters? Bringing together people from such different areas is therefore undoubtedly a challenge. But undoubtedly, it is also a necessity. In a world as interconnected as is today, we couldn´t afford to work in any other way than on the basis of cooperation and friendly ties. Although, as we can see from the tragic example of the war in Ukraine, this is unfortunately not a given.

We in the European Union are addressing the process of rapprochement between countries and peoples with strategies. By the way, we are very fond of strategies and so we have them for almost everything, from economic to human rights, from development and sustainability to disaster risk reduction, and so of course we have strategies for connecting between regions, near or far....

In 2018, the European Union presented a strategy for improving global connectivity under the title “the EU Strategy on Connecting Europe and Asia”. Connectivity within the meaning of the strategy is to do exactly what we here are looking for, that is bring countries, people and societies closer together and facilitates closer economic and personal relationships. It includes hard and soft factors, infrastructure as well as cultural relations. A key element of the strategy is to guarantee internationally agreed standards, sustainability and transparency. The economic and political sovereignty of the target countries and their citizens is thus ensured at all times.

Another strategy to meet the goal of rapprochement is from the year 2021; its name is EU Strategy for cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. It focuses on seven areas: sustainable and inclusive prosperity; green transition; ocean governance; digital governance and partnerships; connectivity; security and defence; and human security. So the strategy covers all areas that are important to the lives of all citizens, whether they live in Europe or Asia.

The Strategy is inclusive of all partners in the region wishing to cooperate. At the same time, and working with international partners who share similar concerns, the EU will continue to protect its essential interests and promote its values; namely democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

Even for the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union is Indo-Pacific of crucial importance, which is why we have developed our national strategy for the region. It respects fully the objectives of the European Union, but focuses primarily on three key areas of possible cooperation: to better respond and be better prepared for natural disasters using satellite system, to better defend against cyberattacks and to more effectively protect the environment, especially endangered species.

For all of these examples of good developing cooperation between Europe and Asia, I have used excerpts from the websites of the European Union and Czech Presidency as well. And although the strategies are of great importance to the citizens of all our countries, I am sure our compatriots have little idea of their existence. And why is that? Because they are not communicated in a sufficiently interesting, readable and understandable way. Which is, of course, wrong, and it really is high time to start correcting these mistakes that we are making on our side.

Another example, the recently signed aviation agreement between the EU and the ASEAN countries, or more correctly the EU-ASEAN Comprehensive Air Transport Agreement, called CATA for short, is one of excellent concrete steps towards getting closer to each other and so to get to know each other better. And frankly, who among our fellow citizens knows anything about it?

And yet, the new agreement is the world’s first block-to-block aviation agreement that will replace all EU Member States' more than 140 existing bilateral aviation agreements with the ten ASEAN Member States. It encompass a combined population of more than 1.1 billion and over 11 million passengers on direct EU-ASEAN flights. Travelers will stand to benefit from direct access to new destinations as well as a greater network of flights between and beyond the two blocs. And again, who actually knows about it?

To conclude, I would like to underline that I am aware of how difficult it is to translate especially legal texts into understandable language. I know that presenting them to people in an interesting and readable way is not an easy task. But we all know well that in order to be understandable, we must first understand people and to understand them, we have to listen to them first. And that's exactly what I'd like to ask you to do: listen to the people to understand them and then write and describe clearly what we diplomats actually do. Because your work is the most important for presenting to people these useful and wonderful concrete steps to bring us closer together.

And at the very end, I would like to thank ASEF very much for the organisation of this seminar because it is through such activities that the people of our two continents can get to know each other more and more.  

Thank you."