According to Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó, the European Union is in an increasingly bad shape for a number of reasons, one of which is the failure of the enlargement process.Continue reading
Peace is the main achievement of European integration, Tibor Navracsics, the Minister of Regional Development said in a speech at the Ludovika Festival in Budapest on Thursday.
At the festival organized by the University of Public Service (NKE), Tibor Navracsics pointed out that the European nations have developed a system in which national interests and the conflicts, that inevitably arise and conflict with each other do not end in war, but the parties sit down at the negotiating table and reconcile their interests.
The minister also expressed his support for enlargement because “experience so far has shown that there is no war within the European Union, between the member states of the European Union”.
Where the EU is already there, it can develop a conflict management mechanism to prevent war,”
he said. Navracsics also said that the difficulty of EU enlargement should not be a reason to leave the Western Balkans and the post-Soviet space in “total geopolitical instability”.
He also pointed out that European integration has never been confronted with a situation like the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The minister said that the EU cannot become a “pro-active actor” in a war situation, which is why he finds the Commission’s strong commitment strange, because the EU has always been limited to brokering peace in similar situations, whether during the Yugoslav wars or the 2014 conflict between Russia and Ukraine. He stressed that peace requires a ceasefire first, which is why the Hungarian government’s position is logical.
Featured photo via MTI/Kovács Attila