Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-13-Speech-1-078"
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"en.20041213.10.1-078"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, seeking these negotiations involves the abandonment of two principles. For a start, such negotiations would begin before the political criteria were fully complied with. Secondly, I am amazed at the Left adopting this approach when there are issues of torture and human rights; I am particularly amazed by their capacity for distinguishing between systematic and non-systematic torture, and I find it quite astonishing that such a distinction should be drawn.
Quite apart from that, I am not persuaded by the argument that this would reach out to the Islamic world. Professor Winkler, perhaps Germany’s most important historian, and a member of the Social Democrat Party, said yesterday that, for historical and other reasons, no such effect could be expected from Turkey, which is, after all, the successor of the Ottoman Empire.
The Commission’s report is full of doubts. Today it tells us that there could be no negotiations on matters affecting finances before 2004, because the EU was not ready. There is a permanent question mark against the free movement of labour. Even now, in the Commission’s report and, evidently, in the Council Presidency’s preparations, consideration is being given to the possibility of failure, and that is an indication of how mendaciously this matter is being approached. Many of those who take a favourable view of it do not ultimately believe that it will work, and that too I regard as unfair to Turkey, which is indeed of such strategic importance to us and which must be helped to become more democratic.
This ‘all or nothing’ strategy, involving negotiations lasting some ten or fifteen years and even then perhaps without a positive outcome, strikes me as misguided, and that is why we have to find a second option facilitating a European economic area with a privileged partnership or whatever else one wants to call it. The fact is that what is at stake here is whether the European Union will survive with its political unity intact and retain its political capacity to act. I have to contradict Commissioner Verheugen and say that there is one thing that must be clear at the present time: how can it be said that Turkey absolutely must accede and that Ukraine cannot under any circumstances? Nobody has been able to explain that to me. That being so, it follows that both must be accepted as Members, and there is doubt in my mind as to whether the European Union can manage that as things stand at present. So let us seek out new ways of giving all these countries the prospect of membership in the EU, while at the same time allowing the European Union to grow politically."@en1
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