Italy and Holland are “heavily committed to strengthening the European economic and monetary union”, to EU “institution building” and to common security, asserted Minister for Foreign Affairs Giulio Terzi at the end of a meeting at the foreign ministry in Rome with his Dutch colleague Frans Timmermans.
Regional accords, banking supervision and common European defence
European economic growth can also be stimulated through “regional accords” to which Italy and Holland can contribute, while on the governance front, the creation of a “single banking supervision mechanism” is “urgent”. Italy and Holland, Terzi added, also agree on the need for a “European defence that supplements and converges with Atlantic security”.
Timmermans underscored how, in order to create a “European construction” that responds to citizens’, needs it was going to be necessary to work on “greater north/south cooperation”, and in that sense “founder nations such as Italy and Holland are in a position to trigger a European dynamism that will be appreciated by their citizens”. Joint initiatives could be developed in Brussels, he added.
The Syrian crisis
Discussions also centred on principle international situations such as the Syrian crisis, the solution to which, Terzi stressed, “cannot be but political”. The minister pointed out that “the military evolution is certainly not in favour of regime forces but could also take a long time to achieve solutions, so the task surely falls to diplomacy and the dialogue set up between Washington, Moscow and the UN and Arab League Envoy is important”. Timmermans explained that “there will be no future for Assad in Syria” and recalled that in Marrakesh his government had said it would be in “favour of a more important role for the opposition coalition”, and that yesterday’s speech “showed that Assad does not want a political compromise”.
