Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-21-Speech-1-123"
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"en.20021021.9.1-123"2
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"Mr President, I speak as shadow rapporteur on behalf of my group. We congratulate Mrs Frays on her report and will broadly support its adoption. We have tabled two amendments which we hope the House will accept.
The report constitutes a useful analysis of measures to encourage theatre and the performing arts throughout the EU, particularly focusing on the need for mobility. Presaging the enlarged EU, the rapporteur's explanatory statement notes that the candidate countries could not support cultural programmes through the PHARE and TACIS programmes but that artistic cooperation has been enhanced through the THEOREM programme, by which they gained access to the Culture 2000 programme last year, as Commissioner Reding has just reminded us.
In Mrs Fraisse's speech she drew attention to the need for vision and coherence in cultural matters in the EU and particularly in the enlarged EU. I very much support that. It is timely, following the Commission's announcement of approval for the ten candidate countries to accede to the EU and this weekend's referendum in Ireland, which cleared a potential obstacle to the enlarged EU.
The EU's character is going to change very dramatically, particularly with the accession of the Central and East European countries. Culture surely has a huge role to play in this respect. To what extent does the existing programme deal with the years of collective amnesia in Western Europe, perhaps not so much in Germany and Austria, where there were always historical and family links, but in other countries where the shadow of the iron curtain still exists.
Bearing in mind Mrs Fraisse's call for vision and coherence, have we really done enough to bring home to the public in the present EU what completing the European family is going to mean, in the theatre and performing arts as well as other cultural fields? When Stalin outlined his project for Central and Eastern Europe, Winston Churchill's reply was ‘the eagle must let the small bird sing’. I wonder whether we feel today that all the institutions of the EU have done enough to let the small bird sing."@en1
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