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Former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana began his new job as the European Union's foreign policy supremo on Monday by pledging to make the 15-nation bloc a more powerful player on the world stage.
Solana, who held NATO together during its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, vowed to forge a single foreign and security policy by working closely with European Commission President Romano Prodi and External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten.
"The European Union is already a global player on the world stage," Solana said in a statement which he read to reporters at his new headquarters in Brussels, a few kilometres (miles) from his previous office at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
"Europe is crucial in the formulation of the major trade policies, financial trends and monetary decisions. It is high time for Europe to become a more active and influential global power."
He set three goals as the EU's first High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy: making the reaching of decisions on foreign policy effective, matching those decisions with deeds and building effective security and defence policies.
He also said the EU must pay more attention to what ordinary European people want, show it was meeting their interests and explain its actions to them better.
COOPERATION WITH OLD FRIENDS
Solana's first meeting was with Prodi and Patten. The three men, described by Solana as "old friends", smiled and laughed their way through a meeting with reporters to try to end fears of a turf war between the men overseeing EU foreign policy.
"We have, as the president and Javier have said, a very large collective responsibility and a very big job to do. I'm very much looking forward to doing it with Javier," Patten said.
They did not say how they would divide responsibilities in what Prodi called a "very difficult field of European policy", and the EU has not yet given Solana a detailed job description.
EU member states want the 57-year-old former Spanish foreign minister to apply the political skills and tenacity he showed at the 19-member NATO to give the Union a clear and coherent foreign and defence identity.
They are anxious to respond better and faster to challenges such as recent conflicts in the Balkans, during which the EU was accused of being weak and slow to react.
Above all, the EU hopes to speak with a single voice on foreign policy, something which has eluded it because of the often conflicting national interests of member states.
It hopes finally to answer the question posed by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger many years ago about what number to dial if he wants to speak to Europe.
Solana's role is complicated by what is expected to be the biggest expansion in the EU's history as it takes in former Communist-ruled countries in eastern and central Europe. Enlargement is likely to make achieving unity harder than ever.
EU leaders are also considering putting Solana in charge of the Western European Union (WEU), the bloc's defence arm, and pledged "full backing" for him as high representative in his new role at a meeting in the Finnish city of Tampere on Saturday.