Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-09-Speech-3-059"
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"en.20080409.20.3-059"2
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Mr President, if the seven states of the former Yugoslavia all come to form part of the European Union in future, this will have happened on seven different dates as the result of seven different ‘road maps’. Accession
before the federation broke up, would probably have been easier for all concerned. Slovenia is now a member, Croatia will follow within the next few years, and the third former Yugoslav republic concerned is Macedonia, which has been awaiting the opening of accession negotiations since back in 2005.
I hope that my subsequent annual report, at the start of 2009, can be all about normal domestic developments in Macedonia, including care for the environment, independence of the media, improvement of the judiciary and the fight against corruption, modernisation of the railways, equality of the various religious denominations, and freedom of negotiation for the trade unions. This will be possible if the two problems leading to discord that are attracting the most attention are solved definitively. We have not yet reached that point.
Relations between the two major language communities have improved greatly since the major conflict of 2001. The Ohrid Framework Agreement that followed, and in particular the agreement on qualified parliamentary majorities and administrative decentralisation, has made an important contribution to improving mutual relations – which are not yet free of conflict, however – resulting in a temporary parliamentary boycott and a short-lived governmental crisis.
It is in everyone’s interests that the problems underlying this be solved as quickly as possible. In a multiethnic state, the complete equality of status of regional languages, including in administrative communication at national level, is an essential symbol of the complete equality of all inhabitants. Macedonia can learn from more than a century of linguistic conflict in another bilingual state, Belgium, that delaying this inevitable outcome just leads to unnecessary tension. The desire for everyone to be able to use the Albanian language everywhere must be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, the issue that, at the preparatory stage, not only the rapporteur but also all the shadow rapporteurs believed had to be resolved quickly, is still receiving the most attention. We all refuse to side with either of the conflicting viewpoints of the two neighbouring countries regarding the significance of the name ‘Macedonia’.
To the candidate country, looking back over more than a century, Macedonia has been, successively, the name of a resistance movement against the Ottoman Empire, of a Yugoslavian federal state, and of an independent country. To its southern neighbour, Greece, Macedonia is an important part of its own long history and the name of the region around the Greek city of Thessaloniki.
Greece has invested a large amount of capital in its northern neighbour and is the most emphatic supporter of the country’s accession to the European Union. It is an important step forward that Greece has abandoned its attempts to replace the name ‘Macedonia’ for its northern neighbour with ‘FYROM’, a term completely incomprehensible to everyone, in favour of emphasising that this state does not cover the whole of historical Macedonia, but only the Slav and Albanian northern part.
I have always opposed the view that a state – particularly one formerly under Communist rule – must become a member of NATO before it can be admitted to the European Union. In Macedonia’s case, the refusal on 2 April to admit this country to NATO does affect its chances of joining the EU in the near future. Each Member State has the opportunity to block any newcomer, even if it would like to admit this newcomer if there were not a difference of opinion on one sensitive detail.
Therefore, section 37 is central to this debate. In this connection, and in agreement with the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats, the Socialist Group in the European Parliament and the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, I tabled a compromise amendment this morning. I await the reactions to this before my second turn."@en1
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