Hungarian government continues to promote soonest possible EU enlargement
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Hungary continues to promote European Union (EU) enlargement as soon as possible because the community has been in great need of new impetus and dynamism, which the accession of Western Balkans countries could provide, the foreign minister said in Berlin on Tuesday.
Péter Szijjártó told a Berlin Process foreign ministers’ meeting that among “the current turbulent changes,” the EU needs freshness and new energy to stop its decrease in competitiveness and overcome the challenges.
“We believe the Western Balkans is the place from where this new inspiration and new impetus could come,” he said. “This is why we put enlargement at the top when we compiled the programme of Hungary’s EU presidency,” he added. He condemned that candidate countries from the region had been waiting for eleven years and five months on average for accession and their request for candidacy had been submitted more than fifteen years ago.
“It is obvious that if we do not make progress in this process, it will hurt the credibility of the EU’s enlargement policy,”
he said. Szijjártó added that his EU counterparts would frequently talk about the importance of a merit-based process but the failure to make progress would actually show that this principle was being neglected. “It is very obvious that despite the good performance of the candidates, the enlargement process is not moving ahead,” he said.
He said it was during Hungary’s previous EU presidency that the EU was last time enlarged, when Croatia’s accession process was successfully finalised.
The EU would never allow another Russian proxy veto in its’ organization with Serbia. Hungary is too much already. Before any further enlargement takes place the EU will need to end the veto power of members replacing it with a form of super majority requirement for votes.
Western Balkan countries certainly feel that they are ready to become takers of EU funds, just like Hungary is. But EU cannot handle more takers, it needs contributors. Also, like Larry said, EU need to change its own legislation to no let one or two religious authoritarian ruled member states veto important decisions with their “common sense” (and zero knowledge) based viewpoints.
And everybody knows about the security risks there are with having open borders into EU from Western Balkan countries. There is plenty of development in legislation to do in these countries before they could be EU members. Anyone can read about these issues from European Comission website.