Mr President, the aim of the Brok report, as with other reports on this subject, is to get the message across that the candidates are welcome, although we do not hide the fact that the groundwork leading up to their joining is a momentous task. This is why the Group of the European People’s Party and is of the opinion that all amendments and viewpoints which implicitly tighten criteria and raise barriers to accession should be scrapped or voted against. This is how we came to go through the text, and attempted to cut down on certain items in the process. Our message to the accession candidates is the following: do not get overwhelmed by the number of reports and dossiers before us. All we have done is to make an attempt to give you sound advice as best we could, with the best of intentions, and in many cases we have succeeded in doing just that. Within the Union institutions, the views on enlargement continue to be positive and you must therefore contradict every ambassador from your countries who believes otherwise. The Commission has cherry-picked its officials for the task in hand and Parliament remains passionate about this project, which is the best proof that the political climate has not been so favourable for a century. I have already warned colleagues in Central Europe about this; when the tone sobers down, then this is only proof that we are moving from the honeymoon period into a life of domestic normality within Europe. It is all starting to become very real, and this requires both negotiations on specific practical matters as well as level-headedness. The does not want to take on the responsibility for pacing accession from the candidates because we cannot set any dates in this respect. People, especially from the relevant countries, often ask about accession dates because they would so much like to share some of the responsibility for these dates. We should not do this as this is outside our remit. We can at best promise accession scenarios and, in fact, we must draft these anyway in order to clearly mark the path to the Union. We can also pledge to make every effort to make accession or ratification before 2004 possible, so that at the 2004 elections, some candidates will be seen to take part in these Parliamentary elections. Needless to say, all of this will also require thorough institutional reform – and this by 2003. We must keep this date in mind for our own sakes. The President-in-Office of the Council replied that this reform cannot, of course, take place without involving the citizens. Thinking along constitutional lines, I thought he was validating the right of Parliament to monitor these reforms democratically. After all, we have been given the citizens’ mandate to do this. But I am not sure whether the Minister was thinking along such constitutional lines. Reform is not the only change we need, of course. We want an effective communication policy which enables the citizens in the European Union and in the accession countries to take part in the political debate in a meaningful manner. Policy in this respect is still not sufficiently in tune with democratic standards. There are now forces in the Member States, both present and future, which want to exploit existing uncertainties. We all know it: to play on people’s fears is an electorally useful exercise and parties which have no political goals other than gathering seats, like to indulge in manipulating people’s feelings of uncertainty. This is inexcusable. Mr Burenstam Linder, a former Swedish colleague of mine who was an expert in this field, explained to me that any enlargement of the European Union, whenever it took place, has always resulted in an excellent cost-benefit analysis on the part of the new participants and those already in the Union. It makes little sense to start to doubt in public the value, including the direct value at a material level, of this enlargement. Unfortunately, there are too many parties at the moment which have shed their ideological feathers and, as a result, display too little ambition and too much materialism. President Havel from the Czech Republic recently mentioned in his speech to the IMF the lack of spirituality in our culture, the lack of standards and goals which transcend the pursuit of immediate gain. We can gauge our Parliament’s depth and spiritual engagement by the way it handles enlargement. The tasks facing us in this debate are so great that they spell out the importance of political views. Do we react as overfed Westerners who only care about our own fast-growing prosperity and certainties or do we take a wider view? A wider view of the kind that was held at the start of European integration by its pioneers. Well, Mr President, let us spread the word that it is precisely these new opportunities arising from enlargement, to include former dictatorships and countries under totalitarian regimes, which can help us broaden our horizons. I hope our debate will give the new candidate states a shot in the arm.

Political group: PPE-DE