The EU's foreign policy supremo, Mr Javier Solana, is being sent by the foreign ministers to the Philippines to help resolve the hostage crisis, despite warnings from President Estrada that his presence could inflame matters.
The ministers, meeting in the Azores in informal session, insisted, however, that Mr Solana would absolutely not be playing a negotiating role but would act as a messenger to the government from the EU, five of whose citizens are being held captive.
Contributing to a debate on the future of the EU, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, warned of the dangers of dilution of the community approach to issues. The increasing tendency for "bilateralism" among member-states, he warned, could jeopardise the institutional balance of the Union, which had served it well.
In response to calls to make the EU's "flexibility" provisions easier to operate, allowing groups of states to organise their own projects, Mr Cowen warned against constitutional experimentation.
The debate, however, reflected a growing momentum, largely among the founder-member states, to include the flexibility issue in the remit of the ongoing Inter-Governmental Conference. Diplomatic sources suggest a Franco-German initiative on the issue may be imminent and the Portuguese presidency has scheduled it for debate at the next meeting of foreign ministers at the summit next month.
Ireland's lack of enthusiasm is shared by a number of northern member-states and Spain although some softening in positions can be observed. The British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, told colleagues that although they did not believe the case had yet been made, the British would not go to the wall to defend the status quo.
The meeting saw the signs of the beginnings of a thaw in relations between the 14 and Austria. Mr Cowen was among those who insisted that Austria had a right to have its concerns aired and five others, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Italy and Germany, signalled the need to find an exit strategy.
The Austrian Foreign Minister, Ms Benita Ferrero-Waldner, suggested the EU should send observers to Vienna to monitor the situation on the ground but the Commission made clear it would not do so.
Ministers also agreed that EUNATO contacts, currently consisting mainly of informal breakfasts between their respective secretary-generals, are to be formalised, initially through four ad-hoc working groups.
These will each respectively concentrate on security issues such as the protection of the secrecy of exchanged documents in the notoriously leaky EU, the implications of the EU's ambition to be able to deploy a rapid reaction force of 60,000, the procedural aspects of EU use of NATO military assets, and the shape of long-term, permanent institutional links.
Mr Cowen made clear Ireland supported such "task-based" contacts, which are strictly limited to developing the EU's peacekeeping, humanitarian capacity.
