Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-25-Speech-2-158"
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"en.20051025.20.2-158"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, if I may remain with Mr Lagendijk’s footballing analogy, the Commission may well have shown both Romania and Bulgaria the yellow card, but that certainly does not prevent the Romanian and Bulgarian teams from having a chance of completing accession in 2007, provided that they play well enough and fairly enough. The Commission was quite right to point out that they have made progress in many areas, but that a number of issues are still outstanding.
Further to what Mr Wiersma said about Romania, I hope that political debate in that country will tend more towards a common European position and that the temptation to divide the country will be resisted. This is where the opposition, the government and the President need to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Turning to Bulgaria, I am persuaded that past omissions will be made good in the course of the process of forming a government. Some of this has already been done and some remains to be.
We will, quite obviously, be carefully observing what the two countries and their governments do to remedy the deficiencies that remain, including not only the major problem of corruption, but also the issue of the situation of the Roma, to which reference has already been made, and to which we, not only in this House, have returned time and time again, with – as I see it – progress being made. There are, of course, anxieties on this score about the possibility that it will not be security being exported to these countries, but rather problems imported from them, if great strides are not made in helping this disadvantaged group of people in the country itself.
All these things will need to be monitored if it is to be possible eventually, in 2007 or 2008, to come to a decision, and one that must take into account these countries’ well-being, for what matters, after all, is that they be enabled to take the right steps. I would like to invite you, Commissioner, to work with this House over the coming months, not only in the countries themselves, but also by improving the way in which the enlargement issue is communicated generally within the European Union.
People are, of course, to some extent, weary of enlargement, and that is hardly surprising in view of the past debates and disappointments, but we cannot simply give in to weariness and say that we are not interested. This debate is about how to persuade people of how important this enlargement is. I would like to see the Commission give us an assessment of the 2004 enlargement, for it might well have been said today that it took us to the limits of what was feasible, but I am convinced that it went very well. That is not to say that there were no problems, but it does, in fact, have the potential to make the European Union stronger, if we work through it together. That too must be debated.
Something else we, of course, expect of the new Member States is a strong commitment to Europe. When the newly-elected President of Poland says that his first two visits must be to the USA and the Vatican, that is something I have to accept, for I am certainly not going to interfere in his travel arrangements, but it is not surprising that there are those who wonder whether Europe, the unity that Poland joined, is not actually more important.
This morning, we had a debate on social standards and social models in Europe, and it is in that area that there are fears that the standards that we have established with a great deal of effort will simply be broken asunder. It is surely not acceptable – and, in saying this, I know that I have my group’s unreserved backing – that we should, now that we are in a process of enlargement and integration, cut ourselves off again and leave our neighbours’ workers, capital or interests standing, so to speak, at the gate. We have to be reasonable about the way we plan the transitional process and try together, in so far as possible, to come up with a new social standard, rather than leaving the door wide open to social dumping.
Presupposing that we succeed in persuading our people of how important this enlargement is to the European Union, I hope that we will take the right decision early next year and that we will be able to set 2007 as the date of enlargement."@en1
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