Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-03-11-Speech-2-173"
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"en.20030311.8.2-173"2
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".
I will respond very briefly to the three related questions. I want it to be clear that this objective of building a ring of friends does not imply any commitment or any exclusion as regards enlargement: none of these countries has the right to membership and none of them is excluded. However, clearly, this does not resolve the issue raised in the last question. Here, I want to reiterate a request – which I have already made to Parliament many times and which I am told has been heard – for a debate to be held in the near future precisely on the Union’s borders. However, the ring of friends is a different project, a project which is not concerned with the enlargement of the Union but which still offers a relationship of close cooperation, which offers gradual integration, which genuinely offers the Union and the countries around it a future of economic and political security. Membership is something different.
To turn to the second question, Mr Wiersma
this was done precisely in order to avoid the accusation that we have merely moved the iron curtain eastwards, as I said in my previous speech. There is no longer an iron curtain. There is no exclusion any more. There are Member countries, but countries which have a relationship of increasing active cooperation with the countries around them, with the ring of friends. It is an organic strategy that will increase the number of Members of the Union through enlargement and create an ever stronger and closer proximity policy through the ring of friends."@en1
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