Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-13-Speech-1-061"
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"en.20041213.10.1-061"2
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".
Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, this Friday, the seventeenth day of December, the Heads of State or Government have a decision to take, and it is one of far-reaching significance. Never before in the history of the European Economic Community, of the European Community and of the European Union has there been a decision with such potential for far-reaching consequences as that on Turkey’s membership of the European Union. Everyone must be aware that, should Turkey become a Member State of the European Union, that Union will undergo a change in character.
In our group, as is inevitable, different people take different positions on this. Let me point out that other parties, too, include former Heads of Government who speak up in favour of Turkish membership or against it. In our group, that of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats, we affirm that we cannot accept any binding obligations, that nothing is automatic, that nothing can be laid down on the basis of things said to one effect or another by former Heads of Government. We affirm that the Turkey issue is a matter of conscience or something very close to one, and so we do of course accept that each and every Member will vote according to his or her conscience.
I would like to thank our colleague Mr Eurlings most warmly for his report and for giving human rights such a high priority in it.
What the Commission is recommending is open-ended negotiations, albeit with membership as an end in view, and tomorrow evening will see our group deciding what position to take on this. There are those in our group who would rather not have any negotiations and who are saying from the outset that they would prefer another form of partnership, to which we have given the name of ‘privileged partnership’. There is another faction that wants negotiations to have membership of the European Union as their objective, and a third seeking negotiations towards the goal of an alternative partnership, which would also be a privileged one. What all three positions have in common, though, is that they see Turkey as a large and important country, whose partner we want to be and with which we want to live on amicable terms. Those in our group who either do not want negotiations or want them to tend towards a privileged partnership – among whose number I include myself – are gravely concerned that, should Turkey join the European Union, this enlargement might prove fatal and Europeans might lose their identity, that it might be detrimental to the sense of being ‘us’ on which solidarity in the European Union is founded.
We in the Group of the European People’s Party have entrusted Mr Wolfgang Schüssel with the task of coordinating our position, and, Mr President-in-Office, as unanimity will be required at the summit, I would advise – and require – you in the Presidency of the Council to be flexible enough to guide it towards a unanimous conclusion. If there are to be negotiations, then it has to be said – frankly and fairly, while acknowledging the progress Turkey has made – that we will be in the very remarkable situation of negotiating with a country in which human rights are violated on a massive scale. We have heard it said, in the most absurd utterance of the year, that there is no systematic torture going on, but if torture is not systematic, it is certainly extensive. We also know that negotiations are going on with the governments as well, and so the governments with which Turkey is conducting negotiations include that of Cyprus, a country that does not even exist as far as Turkey is concerned. There is something illogical about that.
We ask that the Turkish Prime Minister should not accuse us of exploiting the Turkey issue for our own internal policy purposes. On the contrary, we are engaged in discussions with the public, and we have to carry the people with us if we are to unite Europe. Nor are we applying more stringent standards to Turkey; it is a country of a size that we have never seen in previous accession processes, and that is why all this has to be discussed very, very carefully. What we must aim for is that we should have a future as a democratic and energetic European Union."@en1
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