Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-13-Speech-1-072"
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"en.20041213.10.1-072"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, one day the European Union will simply have to decide where its borders are. The Union cannot be a kind of vague area that all of its neighbours can enter to do a bit of trade on the sole condition that they abide by a few rules that are interpreted fairly generally. If, whenever a country bordering the European Union is or is seeking to become even slightly democratic, we have to agree to its accession, then the Union will continue to spread like an oil stain. It will not be truly consistent; it will have no structure and it will have no objective. We will have built a regional UN and abandoned the political union, this genuine project that we have nurtured for fifty years. We will have created the Europe of the diplomats, but not the Europe of our peoples. And that is what the peoples of Europe want.
Obviously the essential question, as Emma Bonino rightly said just now, is what we want for Europe and what Europe means to us. It is clear, I believe, that this is a political, federal Europe that will allow the peoples of Europe to choose their destiny together. If we wish to achieve this, however, welcoming a country with such a large population which, geographically speaking, lies outside Europe does not seem to me to be the right way to go about it.
Secondly, this accession will – as many of those here present have said in the debates that we have held – prompt a long list of new requests for accession. The proposed accession of the Maghreb, the proposed accession of Lebanon, the proposed accession of Palestine or Israel: once again we are building a new, revised and updated UN and not the political project of the founding fathers of Europe.
Finally, Mr President, I would add that in my opinion it is inconceivable to start negotiations with Turkey while it remains silent on the subject of the Armenian genocide – sorry, Mr Rocard, I hope that this request does not shock the leaders of Turkey. It is not possible to start these negotiations while the Cyprus issue has not been clarified. Finally, it is not possible to start negotiations with Mr Erdogan, who wrote recently in major European newspapers that Turkish troops would never leave Cyprus."@en1
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