Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-04-Speech-2-065"
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"en.20010904.3.2-065"2
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"Mr President, since our debate last year on enlargement, there has been very considerable and commendable progress. During this past year, several of the states in the Helsinki group have already in effect caught up with those in the earlier Luxembourg group. It is a year where the emphasis and the élan which was brought to this task by the Swedish Presidency has borne fruit. This is a process that I am sure will be continued and deepened by our friends in the Belgian Presidency.
I welcome the fact that the European Council, with the encouragement of the European Commission, adopted the date of the next European election as a target timetable, all the while emphasising and respecting the fact that we should continue with a case by case analysis based on differentiation. It may well indeed be possible that ten states could be ready by that time and if that is the case, that would be very welcome. But we should not impose on those who are ready by that time the burden and failures of those who may not be and therefore we must still cleave to this notion of differentiation as the leitmotif through which we should analyse the outcomes.
There is a very disquieting level of public support indicated by opinion polls. The Commissioner is right in that we should not get carried away excessively by following every poll but when they are so consistent, underneath it there is a message. And again I would congratulate the Commission in the past 12 months on the deepening and extension of the information and communications policy. But it is very clear that that alone will not be enough. We need political leadership and political vision. We need the big picture to be put in place to convince people what the nature of this historic project is of. In that regard there is the question of the free movement of labour. I am bound to say on behalf of my own group that the Liberal Democrats here in this House are unhappy at the pace with which the thought of having a systematic ban on the free movement of labour became the
. We think that indeed there may be a burden but more empiricism and more reflection may have helped. At the end of the day whether it is realpolitik or empiricism that brings us to this conclusion, my group would appeal that each Member State would reflect on its own position and where possible would opt out from this particular policy. Already I understand four states, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and Netherlands have given such an indication. I would appeal to other states to do so.
But inside this there is another real issue. The frontline border regions are the regions of our European integration process. We here in this House must express our concern for an enhancement of regional policy focus in those places because these regions will carry the most immediate consequence of enlargement. This solidarity is something we must inject into this debate, as Europeans, with greater vigour and not simply leave it to local or national interests to make the case.
On the question of the current state of the enlargement debate, I meet many friends in the candidate states in politics and diplomacy who worry about various tensions that have emerged. My own sense is to say to them they should take reassurance from this. We are now getting real. The shadow boxing has finished and these tensions reflect the reality that we are now in a vigorous process.
Finally three very quick points which I do not have the time to develop. I should like to be reassured by the Commission that the failure to establish paying agencies for Sapard in so many states for reasons which I understand will not mitigate against the carryover of funding that we have dedicated for structural agricultural reform. Secondly, I welcome what the Commissioner had to say on Cyprus and Kaliningrad. I salute what he says about the optimum desires for Cyprus and I hope the UN process will take off with his and others' encouragement but we must remember never to make the best the enemy of the good. Finally, on the question of the Irish referendum, the message given both by the Council and the Commission today is an important one. Yes there may be legal means to get us over the legal niceties but there is within this a political signal and message and the signal must be, that however we may criticise the Nice Treaty, and we all do, we must get over that hurdle as a precondition politically not to do with enlargement but to do it ourselves."@en1
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"politique acquise"1
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