Brussels, 08/04/2008 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 8 February, Alain Lamassoure MEP announced that the European People's Party (EPP) will make the question of the European Union's future borders one of the key subjects in its 2009 European election campaign. During a conference on EU enlargement and consolidation, organised by the Centre for European Studies and the Hanns-Seidel Foundation in Brussels, Lamassoure said “the question of the EU's final borders will be part of our political manifesto”. Wilfred Martens, the EPP president, confirmed to EUROPE that the election campaign would focus on “what we want to do with this European Union” and subsequently, what we want the EU's final borders to be. He put things into perspective by explaining that the debate on borders had to remain “secondary” to the sense and “real objective” of European integration.
The EPP is proposing a “privileged partnership” for Turkey instead of accession and this risks causing a lot of heat at the debate. During the Tuesday conference, Lamassoure gave a taster - “there are too many hypocrites in Europe: in the governments, in the opposition, among the people”. Lamassoure said that they were negotiating with Turkey “but no member state is prepared to fund the cost of Turkey's future accession and no MEP is prepared to give up his place at Parliament” (where the number of seats will have a definitively fixed ceiling through the Lisbon Treaty) to allow for the large number of MEPs from Turkey. He also said that there was “very strong opposition” from citizens in most member states that the “EU should not ignore”.
Mr Lamassoure also predicts “fundamental change” in how enlargement policy works once the Lisbon Treaty enters into force in 2009. He said that the question in the future will not be about where the EU borders end but rather “who is empowered to decide on the borders”. The UMP MEP affirmed that “with the Lisbon Treaty, it will no longer be the European Council or member states that decide, but the citizens of Europe. This will change everything. Accession negotiations will not be 'business as usual' for long”. He also said that once new accession negotiations were decided, the EU would have to make a distinction between candidate countries that are incontestably recognised internationally and those that are “would-be-states”, as is the case for the instant with Bosnia-Herzegovina. He said that the Dayton Agreement is not working, and that the EU had to learn the lesson of the mistake it had made when it agreed to accepting Cyprus without a solution being found to the division of the island. (H.B.)