Bolkestein: EU has reached peak of integration

Outgoing Commissioner Bolkestein believes that further enlargement
would spell the demise of the EU as we know it.

“The world will end not with a bang but with a whimper,” said
outgoing Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein when asked
in a Financial Times interview to describe his take on the EU’s
further enlargement. Bolkestein believes that, at 25 members, the
EU has already reached its highest point of integration, and that
the possible accession of Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova
and the countries of the Western Balkans would paralyse governance
and create “either chaos or a bureaucratic monstrosity in
Brussels”. Bolkestein is known to have been opposed to the
Commission’s 6 October decision to clear the path for Turkey’s
accession talks.

Bolkestein, who will be succeeded by Ireland’s Charlie McCreevy
as the head of the Internal Market DG on 1 November, puts the onus
for Europe’s high unemployment rate on France’s policies and
Germany’s “old-fashioned, industrial-policy-type thinking”. “It is
time they joined the 21st century,” he believes.

In his opinion, it “no longer seems in reach” for the EU to
become the world’s most competitive economy by 2010. The Lisbon
agenda has become overloaded and must be slimmed down, Bolkestein
believes.

Regarding the broader future of Europe, Bolkestein’s advice to
incoming Commission President Barroso is to state a few “elementary
truths” in public. “One of these is that Europe will never be a
federation.”

Meanwhile, in Berlin, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer
reiterated his country’s full support for Turkey’s EU bid, and
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul expressed his confidence that
Germany would help in overcoming France’s objections.

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