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outubro 17, 2004
Integration of EU can go no further, warns Bolkestein
[Fonte: Financial Times]
The European Union has reached its highest point of integration and the eventual addition of Turkey and other countries as members will create "either chaos or a bureaucratic monstrosity in Brussels", Frits Bolkestein, the EU's internal market commissioner, has warned.
Mr Bolkestein, who opposed this month's Commission decision to recommend EU entry negotiations with Turkey, said it would be impossible to run the EU with 40 member states.
"Whoever lets in Turkey cannot very well refuse Ukraine. The western Balkans are already on track. There'll be Belarus, then Moldova. At the end of that process, which may take 20 years, only Russia will be excluded," Mr Bolkestein said. "You cannot hope to expand [the EU] and keep the same level of governance. That is impossible."
In an interview with the Financial Times, the commissioner made clear he was not predicting a sudden crisis for the EU, which this year grew to 25 member states after the addition of 10 mainly former communist east European countries. Instead, describing a gentle but steady decline with his hand, he said: "It will go down like that. The world will end not with a bang but with a whimper."
A Dutch liberal who worked for the Shell oil group before entering politics in the late 1970s, Mr Bolkestein has been an outspoken champion of liberal open markets in his five-year stewardship of the EU's single market. Speaking just two weeks before handing over his portfolio to Ireland's Charlie McCreevy, he blamed the large member states for most of the 1,500 single-market infringements the Commission is pursuing.
In characteristically blunt fashion, he also put much of the blame for Europe's high unemployment on the policies of Germany and France.
"Something must change both in Germany and France. It is time they joined the 21st century. There's too much old-fashioned, industrial-policy-type thinking."
Symptomatic of the two countries' "corporatist" approach was the idea of state-aided national industrial champions, which Mr Bolkestein said "arose out of the fertile brain of Mr [Nicolas] Sarkozy", the French finance minister. "I'm all for national champions, although I'd rather see European champions," he said. "But they have to come out of the market. If they need special government support, that is a nonsense."
Mr Bolkestein suggested that the failure to adapt was costing the two countries dear. "This famous European model that nobody seems able to define is responsible for high unemployment in France and Germany and some other places," he said. "So let's not get too uppity when we look across the Atlantic, thinking we are so much better than the quote-unquote Anglo Saxon casino capitalism - because it provides a lot of jobs for a lot of people."
The commissioner recalled that it was "mainly because the Germans turned tail" that the EU law to facilitate cross border takeovers was watered down. He said it was "not really worth the paper it is written on".
Regretting his failure to get an effective takeover directive through the European Parliament, Mr Bolkestein said: "It was very important. Everybody says they want European industrial policy. Here we had an important part of it and it failed." A fully integrated market in Europe must include shares as well as money, he said, "and if we don't achieve that, it will hold us back."
Mr Bolkestein admitted that the EU's goal of becoming the world's most competitive economy by 2010 "no longer seems in reach". The agenda, agreed by EU leaders in Lisbon in March 2000, was overloaded with supplementary goals such as social cohesion and sustainable development and must be slimmed down, he said. "The problem is that the Lisbon locomotive is pulling too many wagons. Everbody and his grandmother has planted their flag on one of those wagons."
Mr Bolkestein called upon José Manuel Barroso, the incoming Commission president, to state a few "elementary truths" in public. "One of these is that Europe will never be a federation," he said, adding that this "has never been said officially and it is time it was said".
The idea of a federal Europe "generates the wrong ideas", Mr Bolkestein explained. One was the "European tax, which is a bad idea". Another was "the idea that the Commission is the government of Europe, which we are not and which unfortunately Romano Prodi [the soon-to-retire Commission president] said at the beginning of his mandate."
Publicado por jpdias às outubro 17, 2004 11:03 PM