Mr President, I do not wish to say anything about the content of my report on the Czech Republic. Anyone who has read it will also realise that the criticism that came from the Right at the end of this morning's debate was unjustified. It does, in fact, contain a number of observations on these points. Allow me to comment on the latest developments. In the past week it has emerged from the Czech Republic that the government has a very ambitious programme, namely that by June 2002 it wants to have met the accession criteria and therefore to regard the accession negotiations as closed. So far, 19 out of 31 chapters have been closed and by the end of the year a further six key chapters should be completed. Commissioner Verheugen rightly said that completing chapters is not the only thing that counts and that neither is it an indicator of how far a country is. Nevertheless, the Czech Republic is well on the way and we should not believe those who are confusing the people in the country. Only last week a leading Czech politician asserted that the European Union was a rigid, unwieldy and costly concern. With your permission, Mr President, I should like to analyse these three erroneously employed concepts. The European Union is not rigid. If there is one constant in the European Community – which today is the European Union – then it is the desire for change and the possibility of achieving it. Since the Fifties, the European Community has been constantly changing and today we are even facing the possibility and necessity of enlarging this Union once more. Anyone, therefore, who says that this organisation is rigid does not know what they are talking about. Secondly, I turn to the charge that it is unwieldy. We should not confuse two different things here. Of course the European Union is a large entity, but it is, nevertheless, manoeuvrable. It can be compared to a great ship sailing across a wide ocean. It can be manoeuvred and yet it is large, like the European Union. The decision-making process is certainly lengthy in the European Union and it is sometimes tedious as well, but what do you actually expect in a Community of 15 sovereign states, where each state – and, incidentally, not least the small ones – is asked what its position is? Everyone has a say, and this is something which those circles in the Czech Republic should bear in mind. So the Union is not unwieldy and it is not rigid either. The third argument, that it is costly, is actually the least accurate because the countries which freed themselves from communism would have had to undergo reform and a process of transformation anyway, regardless of accession to the European Union. There is a further point: there are two possibilities in the European Union, either you receive money or you contribute money. Those who receive money – and the Czech Republic is already one of them – actually ought not to complain at all. Those who contribute money have also shown over the last few decades that they fare very well when they pay money into the European Community or Union because somehow they always get it back again. These three arguments are therefore purely and simply populist, to put it mildly. My final comment on this is that where cost is concerned there are also things which should not be measured or explained in terms of marks and pfennigs or euros. These people in the Czech Republic who are blackening the name of the EU have forgotten one thing, namely our founding fathers' prime concern: peace in freedom. This is something which up until now has prevented wars and, by the way, expulsion. Despite a number of points which are explained in my report, for example in relation to Temelin, the Czech Republic is making good progress. No one should take fright; Temelin is not an obstacle to joining the European Union. Finally, allow me to make one further comment which I already made last year in my report. I am from Saxony, which borders the Czech Republic; in the past in times I was in the same boat as the Czechs and I should also like to be in the future, but in a different boat, a boat which the Czechs can help to steer. Admittedly, no one in the Czech Republic should think that the Czechs will be the only ones deciding where the boat goes because it is not the European Union which wishes to join the Czech Republic but the Czechs who wish to join the EU. Nevertheless, the Czechs are guaranteed to be one of those helping to steer the course of the European Union in the future. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE