Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-11-19-Speech-2-116"
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"en.20021119.2.2-116"2
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"Mr President, as speakers have already said, this has been an historic day for the current process of enlargement. I would like to look beyond Copenhagen to see what is going to happen in the next stage.
Some speakers have raised the question of whether Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's comments about Turkey were outdated, whether this was the wrong message at the wrong time and whether, if Turkey should become a member, that would really be the end of Europe as we know it. He is right to raise this issue, because once we say yes definitively to Turkey and give it a date, how can we say no to Ukraine, Belarus and other countries which probably have more of their landmass within Europe than Turkey does?
Mr Rasmussen, Mr Watson and Mr Haarder have been very liberal in saying that once the political criteria have been met we can give a date for Turkey. What about the economic criteria in the Copenhagen Declaration of June 1993? Central to that declaration was the question of institutional stability, which we all seem to be forgetting as we go about welcoming countries into the Union. Do we really think that the Union is going to be stable once Turkey, and perhaps other countries, which will then no doubt be welcomed under the same criteria, have joined, and that the Union can then be effectively managed?
This question will be examined at the NATO summit on enlargement later this week in Prague. The question which people are now asking is whether NATO is really capable of acting and whether it will be really effective once it has more central and eastern European countries? The same applies to the European Union. The Helsinki Council made Turkey an official candidate country. So did the association agreement of 1961, but will the European Union, with Turkey as a full member, really be fully capable of acting and democratically accountable?
My thesis is threefold. Firstly, we should pause once the ten countries have come in and once we are completing the negotiations for Romania and Bulgaria. To set a date now, or even to set a date for a date, is premature. Secondly we must examine every single avenue, such as a special partnership with Turkey, before we commit ourselves to the full process of opening accession negotiations. Perhaps most important of all, the Copenhagen Council should set a process in motion, as Mr Prodi mentioned this morning, to consider our approach to future candidates seeking membership of the Union, so that we know how to deal with them.
In conclusion, the European Council, headed by the Danes, is sleepwalking into the future. It is easier for everyone to say yes rather than no, but at this stage it seems that no member of the European Council wishes to say yes to Turkey, but none wishes to say no either. Let us be clear in our thinking and let us have a clear strategy so that we can assure Europe's citizens that in ten years' time they will have a stable, prosperous and effective European Union."@en1
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