European Union countries would not use the excuse of the winds of war to walk away from their pledge of budget discipline, European Commissioner for Monetary Affairs Pedro Solbes said today.
"We have not changed our position...the automatic stabilisers will be allowed to play", he told reporters on the second day of a meeting of European finance ministers and central bank governors in Belgium.
This is the first meeting of the European Council of Finance Ministers (Ecofin) since the September 11th attacks on the United States, which Washington has called an act of war.
This has raised fears of global recession and forced Mr Solbes to acknowledge yesterday that EU growth would slip clearly below two per cent this year from three per cent in 2000.
Mr Solbes also said that deficits would be bound by the three per cent ceiling of the EU's Stability Pact, indicating that interim yearly targets for deficit reduction would be washed away by the fallout from slowing growth.
But today he said that he had been illustrating the point that some countries whose budgets were already near a balance or in surplus could allow deficits to rise to cushion the pain of slowing growth - the EU's automatic stabilisers.
But this did not mean that freedom for all countires to let their deficits rise to three percent had now been granted.
"This was not my intention. We have not moved our position (that countries should stick to their interim budget deficit targets)", he said.