EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION IS NOT SIMPLY A LEGAL AND POLITICAL TECHNIQUE OF ASSOCIATION
Address by the President Kucan on International parliamentary conference "Slovenia and the other candidate countries on the path to the European Union - the role of parliaments in the process of enlarging the European Union"

Ljubljana, 3 November 1999

"I am convinced that at this conference you will open up those important issues that demand both a common consideration of the European future and our efforts towards a common European home. This goal is indeed acquiring quite identifiable and realistically tangible substance", stressed President Kucan in his address to European parliamentarians and added that "this substance is contained in the opening up of the European Union and in the European idea of association."

In President Kucan's opinion, a European future in the form of a common European home is "for the moment still more a possibility and opportunity than a present reality. The reality is problems and wavering over enlargement of the EU and NATO, and processes of restructuring within these two groupings. The reality is the Balkans and the problems over consensus among European countries regarding the future of the Balkan countries, where a full-scale war was raging just a short time ago. The reality is the existence of several Europes, which are the consequence of old, entrenched divisions and also the result of new divisions", which sometimes seem, as the President mentioned in his address, as if life in Europe were adapting to them more and more.

"For this reason European association cannot simply be a technical process of bringing countries together legally and politically. Indeed it is a process of making united and uniting countries ready to live together in diversity, and therefore as a competing community to work towards an order in the globalised world where diversity of cultures and civilisations will not mark out the battle lines of new disputes and conflicts, but rather a need for dialogue between them; and where Europe will take equal responsibility for such a world.

There have never been so many groups or bodies in Europe that would wish to take advantage of this possibility for a new Europe, and that are ready to contribute towards it. Alongside states and national political interests, there are growing numbers of civil movements and civil society institutions. With their experience and hopes, and with their free will, people are putting persuasive pressure on the leaders of democratic countries to finally take that step into a common European future," mentioned the President, adding that "Holding back enlargement until after the candidate countries have fulfilled the conditions can be understood as the possibility of preserving the earlier ideal of a house with a solid fence for the most advanced European countries. And then we might be able to speak of the egoism and nsufficient solidarity of one group and of the illusions and frustrations of the other group".

"We all agree - and of this I am quite certain - that the foundation of the European future is democracy, states ruled by law and free markets. And for this reason the parliaments of individual countries and the European Parliament play a key role in the process of association and integration with the European Union. It is the parliaments that assume responsibility before their citizens for the range of decisions that must be taken for the successful incorporation of the individual country, with all its human and economic potential, with all its knowledge and culture, into the integrations such as the European Union and NATO. Nevertheless, parliaments cannot take the place of citizens, who will need to have their say in referendums on joining the European Union. This is such an important and - in my view - inescapable decision, that in the end citizens themselves must take responsibility for it", underlined President Kucan in conclusion.