| The head of Hungarian diplomacy participated in and addressed the ministerial conference on European Union Strategy on the Baltic Sea Region organised by the Swedish EU Presidency in Stockholm on September 17-18, 2009. Representatives of the Danube countries were also invited, considering that the Baltic Strategy serves as a model for the EU's Danube Strategy which is now being shaped.  Péter Balázs briefly reviewed Hungary’s standpoint regarding the EU’s Danube Strategy and outlined the logic on Hungary’s contribution. He pointed out that animating macro-regional strategies is particularly important, since there is no appropriate decision-making in the European Union covering areas which are smaller than the EU – as an organisation – but bigger than the Member-States; the macro-regions – “located” in between the two – could strengthen cohesion and coherence.
Mr Balázs added that designing and implementing the new macro-regional strategies will not require additional EU funding or legislation; all this is available through the co-ordinated and focused use of existing policy instruments and resources. The entire Danube Strategy affects about 100 million people in the Union and its immediate environment. The Foreign Minister went on to discuss the establishment of geographic borders for the Danube Strategy: he stated that the Danube region can be defined as a chain of regions and sub-regions along the Danube. At the time of preparing the strategy, we are already looking at Croatia as a would-be Member State; and we also count with the participation of candidates linked to the region as well as partners in the EU’s Neighbourhood Policy Programme. Hungary plans to play a liaising role between the region’s more advanced “upstream” (north-western) and dynamically growing “downstream” (south-eastern) countries. Especial efforts will be made in the interest of increasingly positioning Budapest as the “Danube’s capital”. In line with that plan, the next Danube Summit will be organised in Budapest next March and the Danube Strategy is expected to be approved during Hungary’s EU Presidency in 2011. (September 18, 2009) |