Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-12-14-Speech-2-042"
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"en.19991214.3.2-042"2
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"Mr President, firstly a premise which, I believe, is true for every one of us, but most especially for our President, Nicole Fontaine. I feel the matter of the status that the two Members of Parliament will have at the Intergovernmental Conference is quite intolerable. We cannot accept it, and our President should make this known. This is the status of NGO. Do we wish to be and to continue to be an NGO? We would be, like the NGOs, mere observers. I think it high time that Parliament knew how to say no to this state of affairs.
More generally, I find your memory rather selective, ladies and gentlemen. At Amsterdam, the conference concluded with the fact that if we were to number more than 20 members, we should have to implement at least three reforms. This is no longer the scenario. The current scenario envisages 27 Member States and yet more in the years to come, requiring much, much more far-reaching reforms. By accepting these conclusions, we are making ourselves, Council and Parliament, accessories to a policy which will prove to be extremely serious in the years to come, and which will bring the entire European Union to a halt.
This Parliament cannot pretend it does not understand or that it is not aware of this policy. We cannot, as some of my fellow Members have said, consider that we can discuss matters with the Portuguese Presidency when we already know there is a majority in the Council ready to oppose adding items to the agenda. We must use the only weapon available to us, and if Mr Barnier does not agree to call it an all out strike, then let us call it resistance. In any case, we cannot defer until June the battle that we must wage in January.
Our problem is the opinion which we must deliver prior to the start of the Intergovernmental Conference, i.e. as early as January. We could, of course, act complacently, we could pretend to close our eyes and to believe that we might convince the Portuguese Presidency, which in turn may convince the other Member States. We can delude ourselves. We have already done so often enough. Now, perhaps, it is time for Parliament to wake up.
As regards enlargement, I think we are insulting a number of countries, without even being aware of it. We extended candidacy to Turkey. This is fine, even if, as always, it was done too late. But we are abandoning countries such as Albania, Macedonia and Croatia, even though there is no reason to abandon them, since we decided that each country might enter the Union when it has implemented the necessary reforms. We must extend candidacy to these countries as a matter of urgency, just as, as a matter of urgency, we must recognise that Chechnya is not located somewhere on the moon, but in a region of Europe, in the Transcaucasus. It is a matter of urgency that Europe should have a policy worthy of the name in this region, otherwise, just like the Balkans over the last ten years, we shall see it becoming a region of war and destruction, as is already the case in Chechnya today."@en1
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