Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-18-Speech-3-406"
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"en.20060118.24.3-406"2
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"Mr President, I should like to make clear my wholehearted support for Mr Tannock’s outstanding report and also the Commissioner’s excellent, practical neighbourhood policy.
Nevertheless, I cannot and shall never accept certain concepts. What do the ancestors of many western Ukrainians have in common with the ancestors of the Commissioner or myself, of Mrs Hybášková or Mr Rouček, of Mr Peterle or of many others in this room? They were citizens of a Central European state called Austria-Hungary. No one has yet been able to give me a rational explanation as to why some of these citizens should suddenly be Western Europeans and others Eastern Europeans, or why, indeed, some of them – as some people thoughtlessly say – should suddenly be Europeans and others Europe’s neighbours.
The neighbourhood and enlargement policies, like economic policy, need the concept of regulatory policy. The fact is that Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova are unambiguously European countries – as are the South-East European countries that we curiously label ‘Western Balkans’. All of these must ultimately be given the prospect of full membership of the European Union, even if we currently know that, for some, such as Ukraine, Belarus or Moldova, this is a very long way off.
For this reason, the European neighbourhood policy makes perfect sense as a staging post. We must simply distinguish here, however, between those for whom this policy represents the prospect of European membership, on the one hand, and those with whom we wish to have permanent associations as neighbours, such as the countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, on the other.
In this regard, I very much liked the remark by Mr Özdemir of the Greens today that we need greater interlinking of the Barcelona process and the Mediterranean countries with the European neighbourhood policy, as our Mediterranean policy will have to be a neighbourhood policy in the classical sense in the long run. That is why, today, we have to come to terms with the concepts and categories as they are currently set out. We should not lose sight of the realities of the situation, however, or a rude awakening is in store, something of which we saw chilling signs this winter in the form of the situation between Russia and Ukraine."@en1
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