Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-15-Speech-3-224"
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"en.20060315.20.3-224"2
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"Mr President, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, I will start by congratulating you on your historic achievement in Luxembourg, in which you paved the way for the accession of Croatia, the only central European state other than Switzerland not yet to be a Member State of the EU. I will also congratulate you on the great courage with which you launched there the debate on the frontiers of Europe, which is long overdue.
Secondly, let me say how grateful I am to you for having, in Salzburg, argued in favour of the other South-East European states being given the prospect of accession. I do indeed believe that we must not budge on this; there must be no doubt whatever about the fact that the states of South-Eastern Europe are indeed European, and that they are entitled to become full members of the European Union as soon as all the criteria have been satisfied – which includes the enlargement criterion that applies to us.
Thirdly – and here I have to disagree with Mrs Koch-Mehrin – I would like to say that what we should be doing for Palestine is not just giving humanitarian aid, but also helping them to achieve pluralism – difficult though that must be conceded to be. Corrupt and dubious though the Fatah state was, a state ruled by Hamas would be even more objectionable. We must promote the peace process and pluralism by every means to hand in order to prevent an Iranian zone of influence extending from the Gulf to the Mediterranean coming into being.
Fourthly, Iran, which is second only to China as the oldest great power in the world, is not a monolithic block, and that is why we have to apply a combination of stringency and intense diplomatic effort to dealing with it. Here, too, no matter how unacceptable the country’s current President may be, we must not lose faith in dialogue. There is more to Iran than its president; it is one of the oldest states in the world, and we Europeans must do everything in our power to reinforce the pluralistic forces within it and to prevent it from degenerating into aggressive uniformity."@en1
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