Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, there are some fine phrases in the conclusions from the Feira Summit, as there are about progress at the current Intergovernmental Conference, but there are really no solutions in sight. The Summit again pointed to the importance of rapid enlargement, yet the candidate States are still looking to the EU to adopt positions from which it is ready to negotiate. We must be more vigorous about the process of European integration and must not begin to be in two minds about it. The candidate States must not be required to wait for an unreasonable length of time. A new political will is required that will produce more tangible results than Feira did. At the same time, it is a question of being clear about how the institutional questions of enlargement towards the east, qualified majority voting and the numbers of commissioners and MEPs are to be solved. The EU must be able to operate effectively following enlargement, too. At the same time, issues internal to the EU must not delay the enlargement process. The processes must therefore run parallel. With enlargement, there also comes the demand for an EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. There should be no getting away from the fact that constitutional conditions are to apply. There is nothing controversial about that. However, the EU Charter puts the EU’s development in a new perspective. We must show what kind of EU we want. Is it to be one which offers new opportunities and which is more competitive, innovative and entrepreneurial, with more small and medium-sized businesses? Or do we prefer more publicly financed welfare and a weak currency? The Charter Convention ought perhaps to be given an increased mandate to draft proposals for constitutionalising the Treaties, because the issues are so closely interrelated. There is undoubtedly a direct link between the prelude to a new treaty and the actual contents of the treaty. A parallel development could create new political openings and constitute progress, because the various interests would be directly dependent upon one another. To bring about parallel processes of enlargement and deepening, a decision in principle could be made in favour of a binding Charter for the constitutional portion, but not for the portion concerned with issues other than those of principle. The Convention would then certainly know what status the Charter was to be given and could see it as the prelude to constructing the new treaty. Both those whose priority is enlargement and those who give priority to a deepening of the Union would then meet with success. A development of this kind would make it possible to admit new Members early on and, at the same time, equip the Union well to operate more effectively for a long time to come. We have an historic responsibility to overcome barriers and not to intensify conflicts in the way that happened in the case of Austria. We need to replace short-term initiatives with long-term, in-depth cooperation. I believe that, in that way, our basic values, which form the uncontroversial part of the Charter, could be used as a lever for enlargement.

Political group: PPE-DE