Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-11-Speech-2-177"
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"en.20030311.8.2-177"2
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". – Mr President, I can answer the three questions on the principle of work-sharing.
Firstly, the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defence Policy will recall that I have agreed to come to the committee on 25 March to have a full discussion on the Commission communication, which will enable us to follow up in more detail a number of the points being debated this afternoon.
He raised a couple of points. Firstly, what we want to provide is a coherent global framework. However, we recognise that one cannot argue that there should be a one-size-fits-all policy. We must have a policy that is able to accommodate the different levels of economic development and of commitment to our value system. Therefore I hope that there is coherence which is sufficiently flexible to ensure that the policy works.
He also referred to the Balkans. We have specifically excluded from this communication the countries that are involved in the stabilisation and association process, i.e. Croatia and the countries of the west Balkans, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria. They have already been given the perspective of membership of the European Union and we are focusing in this document - as we were asked to do by the Copenhagen European Council - on those countries that do not have the perspective of membership. As the President has said, I am sure there will be a debate in due course on the geographical limits of the European Union. The President was making speeches about this around three and a half years ago. However, this is not the time or the document for that debate. I would just add that it is our intention that the accession candidates themselves should be involved in this debate in which many of them have a larger stake than us.
On the question of how the Mediterranean countries and the Eastern European countries can be involved in our policies, we very much hope that we can involve them in everything from the internal market, trade, migration and the movement of persons to justice and home affairs, financial assistance and issues like governance, human rights and the rule of law. We have been trying to do that through the Barcelona process by, for example, giving more encouragement to those countries that are already involved in the Agadir process, encouraging them to move on from that and to start trying to harmonise their regulations with ours, and involving themselves more in our own internal market. That will be the policy that we continue.
There are a number of countries in Eastern Europe - the western NIS one could call them - who have been unable to join the European Union, even though, like Moldova and Ukraine, they express their European vocation. I hope that what we are proposing to them in terms of trade, economics and political dialogue will increase the size of the common economic and political space around our borders. However, we do not seek to resolve the question of membership for those countries of the European Union in this document.
Finally, I am pleased to have the opportunity to answer the honourable Member's question on this because it is one we have discussed in the past. She quite sensibly asks about coherence in our financial instruments for dealing with cross-border issues. I can assure her that she will find in our document the proposal for a neighbourhood instrument, which will deal with the sort of problems she has referred to. My colleagues who work on enlargement and regional matters will be working with my own directorate-general and others to try to bring this new instrument into operation in the most effective and least disruptive way possible."@en1
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