Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-11-06-Speech-3-042"
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"en.20021106.6.3-042"2
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".
Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, I too would like to start by associating myself with the expressions of gratitude to the Presidency and to Parliament. The pressure exerted by the three institutions together has made the breakthrough in negotiations possible and enabled us to have a solid expectation that this project, the greatest in our time within the European Union, can, as planned, be brought to completion in Copenhagen in December. The post-Brussels political momentum has become even stronger than it was already, and if this Council made anything really visible, it was the shared desire to make a success of this project of uniting Europe, which is becoming ever stronger.
I would now like, briefly, to give you some information on how things have progressed. The President of the Council has already observed that we wasted no time, and that it was as early as Monday last week that we communicated the results to the candidate countries, starting the very next day on a further round of negotiations, which has, in the meantime, been concluded. The object of this round of negotiations was to establish which positions on the part of the candidate countries remain unresolved. We now have a complete overview of everything and of every single item remaining to be sorted out in the negotiations, and here I have both bad news and good news. Let me start with the bad news, which is that there is a great deal more left on the table than we could or should have expected. The good news is that none of it is incapable of being sorted out in the timeframe envisaged, so that it seems realistic in terms of the timetable to conclude a second round of negotiations by the time of the General Affairs Council on 18 November, thus getting a very large number of the still unresolved issues out of the way. This is then to be rounded off by a final round, leading to the accession conferences immediately prior to the General Affairs Council in Copenhagen.
Let me conclude with one political observation – one that is of great importance to me. In the few weeks remaining to us, it will be of the utmost necessity that negotiations be conducted in an extraordinarily political way. No longer can we negotiate as we used to – in a very technical way, often with a very large number of questions going backwards and forwards, but now the setting of clear political priorities and the taking of political decisions really are the order of the day. I have to say with some emphasis, that, in past negotiations, we expected a great deal of the candidate countries, and the European Union's positions were not always founded on in-depth understanding of the candidates' problems; rather, they were very often motivated by our own needs.
I would simply like to remind you that it is not only public opinion in the Member States that has to be taken into account in wrapping up the package for the final negotiations; we also have to bear in mind the fact that the governments and parliaments in the candidate countries have to convince public opinion on their side that joining the European Union is a good thing. Let me also point out that the results of the process of transformation that we have already seen in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have varied to a wide degree. In the countries in transition, people enjoy freedoms that were hitherto unknown to them; they enjoy democracy and human rights. We should not, though, overlook the fact that it is, as a whole, we who have benefited from the economic advantages and the advantages of stability that these transformations have brought into being. It is we who, to date, have benefited most from the transformation of these countries into market economies, a transformation that involved, and continues to involve, serious social hardship for these people. Now is the time to send out a clear and unmistakeable signal that we honour the enormous achievements that have come about over the last ten years in societies over there, and to do this by forcing ourselves to adopt a certain generosity as the negotiations move into their final stage.
This is not about interfering with this or that fundamental principle of Community policy or of the Community method. Nothing in what the future Member States seek is fundamental from our point of view, but it can be fundamental to them and to their ability to win the support they need, and so I very much hope that we will all – by which I mean the Council, the Commission, and Parliament – summon up the flexibility that will be needed if the project is to be a success, not only for politicians like us, but most especially for those who really matter – the people in the present and future Member States."@en1
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