Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-13-Speech-3-068"
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"en.20061213.4.3-068"2
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"Mr President, in contrast to one of the earlier speakers, I regard enlargement as an instrument not of external policy, but rather of European domestic policy; that is why the process of enlarging the EU must not be allowed to burst the bounds of Europe through the accession of a large country like Turkey, which is either only partly European or not European at all. Were that to happen, the European Union would become a Eurasian structure like the Council of Europe, with the addition of an internal market, something that cannot be an attractive prospect to anyone who seeks a really effective Europe that replaces our nation states in the exercise of essential functions, the sort of Europe that convinced federalists – myself among them – want.
On the other hand, though, we cannot block the entrance to countries that very definitely are European, and so I repudiate those attempts at interpreting the Brok report – certain points in which certainly are amenable to interpretation – in such a way as to make the adoption of the constitutional treaty appear an indispensable requirement for the accession of a central European country such as Croatia. In their own recent resolutions, the European People’s Party, the CDU and the CSU have explicitly stated that Croatia constitutes an exception in terms of the enlargement process by reason of its size, its position in Central Europe and its preparedness, and that it should actually have been taken together with Hungary and Slovenia. It might well be described as a leftover
rather than
of the enlargement process that we are currently completing, and that is why I will resist all attempts at interpretations that would make Croatia – as Mr Horáček so rightly said – a hostage to the constitutional process. Yes, of course we have to move the constitutional process forward in this decade; yes, of course we need the constitutional treaty in order to be able to make further strides in the next decade by welcoming into the European Union states – such as those in south-eastern Europe between Croatia and Greece – whose European nature is not in doubt, first among them Macedonia, which already has the status of a candidate state. It is countries such as these that have an entitlement to full Member State status, and that is an entitlement we will uphold."@en1
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