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EU: Enlargement (EUC Report)

My Lords, it was a great pleasure to serve on the EU Select Committee for four years under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, and the report that we are discussing and looking at tonight was an investigation undertaken under his chairmanship. He has spoken tonight in a way that, as all noble Lords will agree, showed great competence, thoroughness and looking at all the different angles involved in the question of how far membership of the European Union should go. It is a privilege to follow him on this subject. The report is indeed competent and thoughtful. We noted with satisfaction the growth in the economies of the countries that have recently joined the EU. That is well catalogued in some of the appendices to our report. We appreciated the expectations of Bulgaria and Romania. When we were investigating they were still two or three months away from joining, but it was clear how much they were looking forward to and preparing for it. But, when we turn to further enlargement, that was the difficult part of the report. We considered countries that used to be members of the Soviet Union; for example, Ukraine. We considered Croatia and the other Western Balkan countries and of course we considered Turkey, the most difficult of all. Was the EU, already 27 countries, biting off more than it could, in terms of administration and understanding by European people, reasonably chew? We came to the conclusion, as the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, has just said, that the process for Croatia would certainly continue; accession talks were on the way. But if Croatia joined—when Croatia joined, I should probably say—it would not be possible then to exclude other western Balkan countries. In that we were helped and advised by the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, who drew on his profound experience of the western Balkan countries. It was a great pleasure to listen to his advice on that subject. For the Ukraine and the other ex-Soviet Union countries our conclusion was that that could wait; there was no one pressing at the door and therefore we did not have to hurry. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, has just said, Turkey was difficult. I make it covered in our report by three more paragraphs than the noble Lord; it is paragraph numbers 205 to 228 and it forms a large part of our report and of the appendices to it. In summary, we believe that it is in both Turkey’s and the EU’s best interests that accession negotiations be progressed and should proceed. But six months have passed since our report was published and in that time Turkey has recently suffered difficulties about the future presidency. There is a rise of political Islam in Turkey and it is not clear how the Turkish people themselves intend at this stage to proceed to deal with that. Most of all, there has been the arrival of Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France. The noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, quoted one recent remark about him from a British newspaper; I should like to quote another. In its leader yesterday on the TV debate last week between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal the Times repeated comments that Sarkozy made in that debate. Sarzoky believes that Turkish membership of the European Union would spell, "““the death of political Europe””." The Times added that it thought that that was mistaken judgment, but that that was Sarkozy’s judgment. Equally, in the Times yesterday, a spokesman for Angela Merkel said: "““In what is one of the crucial phases for Europe, it is important to continue the close, trusting and intensive co-operation between Germany and France””." That surely means that we have to think carefully in Britain about what the next steps of our approach to the European Union should be. If there is to be a powerful alliance between France and Germany, between Chancellor Angela Merkel and the new president Nicolas Sarkozy, do we want to be part of that tripartite alliance or are we prepared to stand away from it, to be alone with some of the smaller countries but not in partnership with France and Germany? I suspect that this is a moment when Her Majesty’s Government must pause and think carefully on what their next step should be. The issues of reducing the number of areas subject to veto by a single country and of a modified but much simpler written constitution are ones that will be debated in the future whether we like it or not. I do not think that at this stage we are clear in our own minds as to what we want to happen. There is no harm in standing back and careful thinking at times. There is an old Latin tag: tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis—times change and we have to change with them. Is that what our position should be at the moment? I hope that this is the moment when the Government will pause, take time and think out what the next movement is, and with an EU that I profoundly wish to see prospering, what the right steps should be.