Juan Fernando López Aguilar. Alejandro Ramos / Canarias Ahora. All rights reserved.
Luis Martin: In his appearance before the European Parliament earlier this month French Prime Minister, Francois Hollande, said that the Syrian conflict could end in a "total war". Do you share his view? What is the EU's responsibility in this conflict?
Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar: Of course I share Hollande’s concern and I have expressed it loudly, as have many others in the European Parliament. The European Union cannot solve the conflict in Syria on its own, however because it cannot resolve the conflict at its origin. Nonetheless, the European Union has a moral responsibility to the region. The creation of the area's artificial boundaries, which were drawn up after the First World War through decolonisation agreements and also the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, particularly by France and Britain via the famous Sykes-Picot agreement, created a lot of today’s problems. These artificial boundaries erected structures on what was a wide swathe of desert populated by tribal factions; nomads with multiple identities essentially aligned around religious groups, the Shia and the Sunni. The conflict today is essentially an intra-Sunni one.
