Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-09-Speech-3-420"
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"en.20030409.4.3-420"2
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".
I voted in favour of the reports on enlargement; my reason for doing so was that I regard this enlargement through the accession of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of Cyprus and Malta, which belong to Europe, as right and as an imperative necessity.
In view of the fact that the Iron Curtain fell almost fifteen years ago, it is not appropriate to take a small-minded view of the difficulties of all kinds, primarily financial, numerous though these certainly are.
Ours is an historic responsibility. There are people who are at last again living in freedom and under democracy – something that is in part due to our courageous stance in NATO in the 1980s when gaining acceptance for its decision to deploy missiles in Western Europe if arms limitation talks failed – and we cannot say to them that the many problems with which enlargement is presenting us mean that they must remain outside. We cannot deal with all these problems at once; we lack the means to do so, or at any rate the willingness to mobilise the means. It may be, too, that many are not willing to share in a spirit of solidarity, or that we have not managed to drum up support for such solidarity among the citizens of the Fifteen EU States.
I hope that all of us – in both the present and the future Member States, and our governments in particular – can summon up the political courage to take the right decisions in order to make of the enlarged Union a home for freedom, peace and prosperity, one that can be an example in a world scarred by crises, wars, poverty and a lack of freedom."@en1
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