Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-02-16-Speech-3-040-000"
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"en.20110216.4.3-040-000"2
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"Madam President, first and foremost, on behalf of the Presidency, I would like to express my acknowledgement and thanks for Parliament’s – and in particular the rapporteur, Mr Swoboda’s – continuous engagement and positive contribution to the efforts we are making to advance not only towards the successful enlargement to include Croatia, but the progress of the enlargement process as a whole.
I firmly believe that all these efforts have been very well demonstrated by this morning’s very constructive and very useful debate. I also firmly believe that the resolution to be adopted will underline Parliament’s crucial role, which indeed goes beyond the concrete item of Croatia’s accession.
This will send an extremely important message to European public opinion, to the citizens of Europe, to the effect that enlargement does indeed serve their best interests, and it will perhaps convince them that the enlargement fatigue which developed, and was felt, right after what we now call the reunification of Europe, has gone, and that the train of the enlargement process has to go on.
At the same time, it will also send an extremely important political message to the other candidate and aspirant countries. This is also underlined in your report and resolution. We all know that the key factor of stability, cooperation and reconciliation in the Western Balkans is indeed the European perspective.
So the European perspective has to be credible and has to be underlined and demonstrated by concrete measures. That is precisely the upcoming accession of Croatia to the European Union. We all know that what we have here is unfinished business. Europe is still not a whole and our fundamental objective is to take this process on.
Some extremely important remarks and comments were made with respect, for example, to whether the accession negotiations have been too long or not. It is true that they have lasted almost six years and that this is longer than the negotiation process was for our countries. What I would recommend now is that we look to the future and try to speed up this process as much as we can.
Very many important advances and achievements have been made on both sides, and I would only underline again and again our determination that, with combined efforts on all sides, we can now make a credible, good quality enlargement. This would be an extremely important message for all of us, inside and outside the present European Union.
I would like to thank you again for your extremely important thoughts and comments, and also to express my thanks to the Commission – all that of course in the hope that we will be able to realise our objective, which is, I repeat, to conclude negations before the end of June this year."@en1
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