‘Pay us back soon’, Fischer tells accession countries

Date: 19/06/03

By Karen Carstens

GERMAN Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has called upon the ten countries due to join the EU next year to start saving some cash now so they can contribute to the European Union's coffers as soon as possible.

"This is not a free ride," he warned last week in Brussels.

"We have had to invest a lot of money in this," he told an audience that included the Polish and Bulgarian ambassadors to the EU, adding that Germany alone has ploughed in some €75 billion, as the EU's largest net contributor, to help make enlargement happen.

"This is not a gift," he said. "We [Germans] hope that Poland will grow and become a net contributor as soon as possible."

Speaking at an event hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU, Fischer also highlighted the importance of maintaining strong transatlantic ties and Germany's newly found role in striving for global peace.

"After the US and the UK, we are the biggest provider of troops for peacekeeping missions," he said, adding that German soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, just as German tourists have been killed in terror attacks in Tunisia and elsewhere.

"We [the US and EU] are fighting the same enemy," Fischer insisted. "We can only destroy this type of [terrorist] infrastructure together - if the United States and Canada cooperate closely with Europe.

"Transatlantic integration is a cornerstone of our mutual strategic stability. We would realize what we lost if we gave up on it."

The German foreign minister also emphasized the need for Americans to understand why the rate of political and economic change can seem so frustratingly slow in Europe.

"When Americans wonder why Europe is not more dynamic, they fail to take into account that there has been a silent European revolution going on since 1989," he said.

"And this takes time because you have to take the people with you - especially the old people," he said, including his own generation in that reference.

He also drew a parallel between the mid-19th-century Civil War that tore a deep gash between North and South in the United States and the lingering wounds of the Second World War in Europe.

"Healing the wounds of the Civil War in the US lasted nearly one hundred years.

"What we experienced in Europe was a much more bloody civil war."

Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, has called on the EU's accession countries to become net contributors to the EU's annual budget as soon as possible.