Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-06-Speech-3-034"
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"en.19991006.1.3-034"2
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"Mr President, the European Parliament is called upon to make give a fundamental, open and honest evaluation of past and future policy on Turkey. Turkey is and remains an important partner of Europe. But this partnership is not strengthened by now offering the prospect of accession to Turkey. We need pragmatic steps on the way to an autonomous European Union Policy on Turkey. We said yes to Customs Union. But in this House the financial services of the Customs Union were blocked. I am asking for these pragmatic steps to be implemented at the earliest possible juncture. We need Turkey as a reliable partner in a geostrategically unsettled region on the edge of Europe.
An autonomous policy on Turkey cannot, however, have Turkey’s accession to the European Union as its objective. The prospect of accession, Mr Verheugen, which the Helsinki Summit will open up and which you have described here on behalf of the Commission, is, we are firmly convinced, clearly the wrong way to go. We are pleading emphatically in favour of an autonomous European Union policy on Turkey, based on the three pillars: partnership in security matters, close economic integration and ongoing dialogue on political, economic, cultural and democratic issues.
The admission of Turkey into the European Union would excessively overstretch the European Union and would impose radical political change on Turkey, which it cannot fulfil in the foreseeable future and, I know, does not even want to fulfil. Therefore, the admission of Turkey would lead for a variety of reasons to a qualitative change in the European Union and to an inevitable standstill in European efforts for integration. The Ankara Agreement is not a sufficient reason for this as, since this Agreement with the EEC, in three amendments to the Treaties, the Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty and the Amsterdam Treaty, Europe has documented its willingness and capacity to transfer further competences from the national to the European level and thus deepen Europe.
My group is, therefore, in favour of an autonomous policy on Turkey just short of accession. We want these high level relations with Turkey for reasons of security policy, economics and politics. But we also want to deepen Europe further and not let it be undermined by accessions which we cannot cope with."@en1
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