Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, I welcome the Greek Presidency's statements about the Balkans, and unlike Mr Alavanos I am also pleased that in the second half of this year the Italians will have an opportunity to pursue this excellent policy further. There are in fact two neighbouring countries that have a vital interest in seeing stability in the Western Balkans, that is to say in south-eastern Europe. It is a fact that these countries – Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania – are at very different stages in their development. They will ultimately have an opportunity, as already promised in Zagreb and as will once again be confirmed in Thessaloniki, to become members of the European Union depending on their own individual progress. The road they have to travel will be a difficult one, as the 10 accession countries have discovered. It will place great demands on their citizens. We recognise the different rates of progress that exist, which are chiefly due to the fact that these countries have all had different opportunities to develop. Until just two years ago, Serbia and Montenegro still had Milosevic. We therefore need to take into consideration those opportunities of which they were unable to take advantage. Many of these problems are, however, common to all these countries, such as the fight against corruption and organised crime, and above all the fight against traffic in human beings. In many of these countries the judicial system is still very poor and deficient. Another cause for regret is that cooperation at regional level is not as good as it is always made out to be. If an appeal is being made to us to grant these countries visa freedom, then, in my opinion, they should first come to an agreement between themselves to allow their own citizens to travel freely. It is not that simple to get from Serbia to Croatia. (Applause) That is why I believe that these countries should first put their own house in order before they start making further demands on us. I also believe that bilateral free trade areas are a good thing. However, they can only be truly effective if they are extended to create a multilateral free trade area. I would like to mention three points contained in our motion for a resolution. It is reasonable for the Stability Pact to be closely linked with the stabilisation and association process. It is important that the CARDS programme, for which ever less funding is available, should be given more money. The money is available; we do not need to create new funding. The pre-accession aid has not been fully used, and I regret that the Commissioner mentioned a figure of EUR 200 million. You probably do not want to exceed that figure, but I believe that we need more, because economic development is a prerequisite for our co-existence, for the development of this Community and for the ultimate solution of the problems of refugees. I would like to touch upon one final issue, and that is the question of young people in these countries. Without their youth, these countries will have no chance of developing favourably. If they are not given a signal now that Europe will not become a reality just for their grandchildren, but now, for them, there will be problems. They are all trying to leave these countries and to emigrate to other countries, such as New Zealand, the United States and Canada. We must open up our Socrates and Leonardo programmes to them. As the rapporteur for the Socrates programme, I know what a difficult business that is. I appeal to the Greek Presidency to play an active role here in ensuring that we really give the young people of these countries a signal that they can take part in our educational programmes. If I rightly understood the communiqué issued by the presidents of these countries on Monday, it contains many good things – many promises and many valuable insights. I only hope that something will be done in Thessaloniki to give these countries a real incentive to translate those promises into action. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE