Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-11-19-Speech-2-115"

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"Mr President, President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that Mr Gawronski is right: it is the 15-Member State Europe which is likely to benefit most from enlargement. However, I feel it must be pointed out and, indeed, I hope the Council and the Commission will comment on this, that this is not the end of the process of enlarging the European Union. There are a dozen Caucasian and Balkan countries which are not even on the list of candidate countries, whose situation is not even on a par with that of Turkey, and they are countries which the European Union needs, just as it needs Turkey, not least in order to prevent the development of any tendencies towards fundamentalism, as a number of Members have said today. We have heard the reports on each of the candidate countries presented, but I feel that it would have been only right and proper to give these ten countries which are about to join the Union a report on the current situation of each of the current 15 Member States. I feel that, from the economic perspective, it might have been appropriate for these countries to know that there is a danger of the European continent becoming ‘Japanified’, that Germany, Italy and France too are now incapable of carrying out the structural reforms that they have to, which, considering their size, could have an impact on the economies of the ten candidate countries. It might also be in the interests of these countries to inform them that the legal systems in some of the 15 countries of the current Union are certainly not worthy of a democracy. I refer to Belgium and Italy but also to what might appear to be more minor cases, such as what is happening at this time in your country, in Denmark, President-in-Office of the Council, and I am referring, in particular, to the way that the authorities of your country are handling the matter of the detention of the Chechen deputy Prime Minister, Akhmed Zakayev. I do not think this can be justified in terms of respect for the rule of law. We are talking about the Europe of democracies, but it may be that we should also be talking about the Europe of democracy. The democracy of this House, the democracy of the Council and the Commission, the democracy of the Union in general, would certainly not satisfy the criteria which we are setting for the candidate countries now. This is the issue being analysed by the Convention, an issue which I hope will be addressed and resolved with a decision to adopt the United States’ approach, to adopt US-style democracy, not with a return to the European tradition which has done so much harm to our continent."@en1

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