Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-13-Speech-2-219"
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"en.20011113.10.2-219"2
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"Madam President, the honourable gentleman's first question can be answered only with great difficulty. I sometimes feel that at one point or another we are demanding of the candidate countries something that the Member States are not doing themselves. This, though, has to do with the criteria we have and our obligation to report very precisely on the extent to which they are complied with – or not, as the case may be. Today, I said to the Commission, and on the same subject, that we must always imagine what progress reports would look like if the same criteria were applied to the Member States. The Member States would never allow us to do any such thing, but so much of what we criticise in candidate countries or describe as incompatible with the Copenhagen criteria, could, perhaps, also be found in one Member State or another. So, at this point, I recommend modesty to our Member States.
Nothing more can, of course, be demanded in the negotiations themselves than is required of the Member States. The negotiations are very precisely attuned to the acquis and to nothing else. They touch on nothing else. The problem you have described can therefore only arise when considering the question of whether candidate countries comply with the indeed very vaguely formulated political or economic accession criteria. My answer is that it may be that we are sometimes asking for more.
As regards the other question of the ten countries, the Commission said today in fact, that we must prepare for the accession of all those which have complied with the conditions and completed negotiations by the end of 2002. This represents rejection of the idea of forming what might be termed political groups, and is, in the Commission's judgment, the correct interpretation of the Helsinki and Gothenburg Decisions. It was stated in Helsinki that all countries that had been invited to negotiate should have a chance to conclude, which can only mean that it was considered that their accessions could be simultaneous with those of the countries which had been negotiating since Luxembourg, and Gothenburg envisaged the first accessions taking place before 2004. It necessarily follows from this that we must prepare for the accession of up to ten countries, I will not say ten, but up to ten, because ten countries have set themselves the goal of completing negotiations by 2002. Whether it will actually come to that, I do not know.
The Commission will produce its concluding opinion next year, and will do so in strict accordance with the principles and rules that it itself has proposed. As I said here in Parliament during the most recent discussion on enlargement, it is a subject on which we cannot let ourselves make political decisions as it were in the worst or narrowest sense of the word, that is, saying on the basis of purely political considerations that one country is coming in and another is not. Such a decision must much rather be founded on compliance with the criteria and on the outcome of the negotiations. The Commission's proposal will be couched in those terms.
None of the ten countries that currently believe they will manage it can evade the possibility of us saying at the end of the day: this country is not ready. Let me say it clearly: none of them."@en1
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