“A strong European Union can only be established if it is built on strong member states”, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said on Friday at his annual hearing before Parliament’s European Affairs Committee.
In his opening speech, Mr. Szijjártó listed five challenges that are threatening European integration and which in his opinion represent individual dangers to the community and with regard to which no substantial progress has been made recently. “The most serious of these is the immigration crisis, followed by the resulting threat of terrorism”, he said, going on to list the war in Ukraine, uncertainty with regard to energy security and Great Britain’s exit of the European Union.
The Foreign Minister highlighted the fact that there is an ongoing debate between the federalist and the sovereignty camps on the future of integration, which is based on emotions instead of rationality. “The former would like as many spheres of competence as possible to be assigned to Brussels, meaning they want to build integration on weak member states”, he said, stressing that he regards this approach as a dead end. “Eleven weak football players will never make a good football team; eleven good football players are not certain to make a good team either, but there is at least a chance of success”, he added.
This debate can only be resolved if “we call problems by their name and leave this period of political correctness and hypocrisy behind us”, said Mr. Szijjártó, according to whom the correct path is to provide real solutions to real issues “instead of trying to paraphrase the issue while sucking one’s teeth and worrying about whether what we are saying is still acceptable to the liberal mainstream”. The Minister cited as an example the fact that in the European Union the immigration crisis must be referred to as the refugee crisis.
Mr. Szijjártó then listed the tasks with which the EU can find its way out of the crisis. Firstly, “we must return to our values” and must declare that “Europe is Christian”. “Then, the EU must have the courage to declare that illegal immigration is damaging to Europe”, he said, adding as a further point the fact that “instead of sanctions we must move forward into a period of pragmatic economic expansion”, meaning for instance, that the European Union must undertake to enter free trade agreements.
The Foreign Minister also suggested the further development of north-south infrastructure and that the EU “must put a stop to hypocrisy” with relation to Ukraine, meaning it shouldn’t criticise the standpoints of other countries such as Hungary while it is itself blocking two issues that are of vital importance to Ukraine, namely visa-free travel and the free trade agreement.
According to Mr. Szijjártó, in addition to the above the EU “must quickly forget” decisions that decrease its credibility, such as the fact that although Georgia has fulfilled all of the requirements it has still not been afforded visa-free travel.
The Minister also mentioned that “fatal errors such as tricking Turkey” by upholding the notion that the migration agreement and visa-free travel are somehow related “should not become common European practice”.
Mr. Szijjártó also called for the continued application of European Union enlargement policy in the direction of the Western Balkans, and stopping the power overstretch of the European Parliament, which in his opinion is conspicuous in dealings between large and small member states.