Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-09-Speech-3-025"
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"en.20030409.3.3-025"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner Verheugen, ladies and gentlemen, this is a momentous and historic day, a day of great joy and of profound gratitude. Let me speak personally; it is my privilege to have been a Member of this Parliament since 1979. If, when Parliament was first directly elected, someone had told me: ‘On 9 April 2003, you will decide whether the three Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Warsaw Pact states Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia, and then also Malta and Cyprus, will join the European Union’, I would have said in reply, ‘That is a tremendous dream, that is a fantastic vision.’ Yet this dream, this vision, is now becoming reality, and let us be deeply grateful for it and rejoice!
We also think back over Europe's history, for we cannot shape the future unless we know the past. Our thoughts go back to the terrible, criminal years of National Socialism from 1933 to 1945. We think back to 17 June 1953, to the Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968, and cast our minds back to the great freedom movements of the 1980s, remembering Solidarity, the popular desire for freedom in Central and Eastern Europe, and 9 November 1989, the day when the wall came down.
Robert Schuman – whose name our Chamber bears – said, as long ago as the 1960s: ‘One day, all Europeans will belong to the European Community, to the European Union, in freedom and in peace.’ Our group has always had that as its objective.
I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all those who have played their part in this, above all to Mr Brok for his work as rapporteur, but also to the Committee on Budgets' rapporteurs, Mr Böge and Mr Colom i Naval, and also to all in the Commission, whom you, Commissioner Verheugen, represent.
The candidate countries can now look back on the massive efforts they have accomplished, but there are still more massive efforts ahead of them. Above all else, we must bring Europe together and reconcile it, both morally and intellectually. It is for that reason that we would have very much welcomed it if the Czech Government under their great President Vaclav Havel and his successor Vaclav Klaus, had had the strength and the courage to utter even one word of regret and sorrow about the people who were expelled. We have to use truth to bring about reconciliation, and now we all have to look to the future together.
To those who believe that our European home is not yet finished and that they should therefore not give their approval to enlargement, I say this: we have succeeded in bringing the Convention into being, and we will work hard to get us a European constitution soon, and to set all Europeans on their shared journey into the future on the basis of law. A quite overwhelming majority in our group – it is almost unanimous – says ‘yes’ to every one of these countries, bidding them welcome to the European Union, to our community of values. Let us, together, take into the future this old Europe, which keeps on renewing itself! That is what we want for our continent."@en1
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