Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-13-Speech-3-015"
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"en.20061213.4.3-015"2
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".
Mr President, while I would like to start by thanking Mr Brok and Mr Stubb for their reports, I have to say, though, that the sight of the pair of them together with Mr Méndez de Vigo leads me to the conclusion that they may well – obviously – not be peas in a pod, but the result is very good, and that, with all due respect to you personally, Commissioner, I regard what emerges from these two reports as better than the report by the Commission, in that ours articulates the matter more clearly and with less ambiguity, and I do believe that the Commission should learn something from this.
Here, among the Members of this House, too, there are those who see a small Europe as a solution, arguing that the smaller the European Union is, the better and the more homogenous it will be, while, on the other hand, there are those who argue that ‘the bigger the better’ since we will then be able to speak for everyone, yet we cannot speak for everyone if we have not found a common voice – something for which, it follows, the conditions must be created. It is quality rather than quantity that is the making of Europe, and I am in full agreement with Mr Méndez de Vigo that this is dependent – among other things – on the European Constitution.
It does not have to be exactly the present constitution, and it probably will not be either, but that constitution’s essential elements must be made reality if Europe is to become effective. There is no doubt about the fact that the second precondition is the proper financial basis; let us be honest about our inability, right now, to give our peoples the things they aspire towards and imagine themselves possessing, things that they are quite entitled to expect from Europe. How, then, is an enlarged European Union meant to work if we do not create the right financial conditions for it?
What we have to tell our governments is that they cannot go around making fine promises about enlargement at the same time as saying, whenever the financial basis is mentioned, that we do not have the money for it; that is not acceptable, and this House must make that perfectly clear.
Let me just say something else about the Constitution. The most important thing, of course, is reform of the institutions, by which is meant not a merely small-scale touching-up job, but a fundamental reform. Much the same can be said, in the financial field, about the financial models that bring about a fundamental change in the financial basis of the European Union.
So let us talk about integration capacity. On behalf of my group, I would like to say that integration capacity functions, not as a barrier against future enlargements, but as a precondition for them; a necessary precondition, moreover, and not merely a by-product of our thinking when we alter this or that detail in an accession treaty, something that will no longer be acceptable in future.
Alongside that, of course, the dialogues on South-Eastern Europe and the Balkans must be continued – not just about Croatia, on which subject I have the honour to be the rapporteur. Even after Croatia, it will not be possible to draw a new border; instead progress will have to be made step by step. As for Turkey, about which Mr Wiersma will have more to say, while it must discharge its obligations, we too have an integration task yet to perform on Cyprus, and that is something we have to do.
Moving to my final point, we need to give the countries in our neighbourhood, particularly those around the Black Sea, a realistic vision, and that calls for the establishment of an intermediate form of a kind to which we in the Foreign Policy Committee have been giving consideration, for Mr Wiersma and I have put forward the idea of an EU/Black Sea Community, to tie the countries there closer to the European Union in what would be a kind of preparatory stage that might – albeit without imposing any obligation – lead to membership if the necessary conditions were met.
Whilst we have to give our neighbours what they desire, we can do that only if we do the same for our own fellow-citizens in Europe, and that we are at the moment not doing; we have yet to create the conditions for doing so, and only then will it once more be possible to take the vision of a great and enlarged Europe and make it reality."@en1
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