Debate: Formal sitting - th Anniversary of the  EU Enlargement
Date: WEDNESDAY, 24 APRIL 2024
Speaker: Pat Cox
Language: EN

At a flag raising ceremony on 3 May 2004, here in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, we welcomed the parliamentary speakers and the nominated Members of this Parliament of the ten new Member States from central, eastern and southern Europe. In a Europe finally breathing on its two lungs, east and west. Symbolically, the ten new flagpoles were made in, and travelled from, the shipyards in Gdansk. These were a gift from the Polish nation, which the then Prime Minister of Poland, my friend Leszek Miller, offered at my request. I thank you here today, Leszek, for that gift, whose passage from Gdansk to Strasbourg symbolised our continent’s journey from an imposed post-war Soviet domination to each nation’s right to choose.  Permit me to share my regret that the United Kingdom chose to leave our Union. But it revealed one powerful truth about who and what we are, namely, a voluntary union of free and sovereign peoples. Free to join. Free to leave. As war returns to our continent, what a total contrast to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, where the imperial and deceitful unity proposed by Vladimir Putin is coming from the barrel of a gun. The blast of a ballistic missile, or the indiscriminate impact of deathly drones.  In the 1990s and the 2000s, waves of positive stimulus were released globally and in Europe. Key among them, the fall of the Iron Curtain, the integration of post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe into the EU, German reunification and the entry of China into the World Trade Organisation. We live today in different times, in a new age of contest and uncertainty, one where Europe’s collective interests and values can be expressed effectively on the world stage. Only through coherent vision and European unity of purpose. The European Union is heavily invested in post-war norms and institutions. From the outset, our values and interests have been well served by them. The defence, reform and promotion of effective multilateralism is central to our strategic goals, but it is set to be challenged more in the future than the past.  I believe our multipolar world is transforming into a multi-order world of contested multilateralism and, moreover, for our continent, unsettled by the war in Ukraine. The comfort blanket of US security guarantees, whether they remain in place or not, are unlikely to be cost free in terms of EU policy choices. Public opinion, politics and governments in the West today, with the possible exception of combating climate change, seem to be more focussed on vulnerabilities than the benefits associated with interdependence than in the early decades of this century. That is why here in Europe, the USA and elsewhere, the world is now facing the most consequential elections of the modern era. Hovering between contested continuity or drastic discontinuity.  This Parliament, and I don’t need to tell you, has always been a parliament of minorities. No group ever held a majority in this House on its own. Policy here is built on de facto coalitions. I would call on all those political forces who have been reliably and consistently European, to rally once more to the cause of coherence and unity of purpose after the parliamentary elections. Your collective wisdom and capacity to influence still will be essential to what comes next.  Madam President, as we acknowledge a successful past enlargement here today, let us remember, as you have done in your speech, all those states now are waiting their hour of European self-expression. The next mandate of both the European Parliament and of the European Commission, needs to assist their transitions towards membership and simultaneously to prepare our Union’s institutional and financial capacity to absorb them.  I have just returned from the latest European Parliament Democracy Support mission to Ukraine last weekend. Thanks to you, Madam President. At this time of profound and unrelenting stress, Ukraine needs the reassurance of our solidarity and of our openness, in due course, to embrace its entry into the Union.  Concerning future enlargements, and I will conclude with this, today’s event recalls, we have done this before successfully, and today’s message should be and must be that we can and we will do this again. To paraphrase the Schuman Declaration, in order to underwrite our Union’s sustainable success, we will need and you in this Parliament will need to make creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten us.  Madam President, behind you, we have our European flag and symbol as it sits before us who look at the speaker’s podium. You will see that it is a circle which in heraldry represents harmony. We see that it is the stars which everywhere in our literature and poetry invites us to dream our dreams. But we see most of all about this harmonious circle, that it is open and not closed. And the message must be it is open to all those European states who share our fundamental values and who wish to be, as the ten states we celebrate today, part of our family and to be welcomed home.