HUNGARY:Visiting his father's homeland, French president Nicolas Sarkozy told Hungary yesterday that only a closely united Europe could meet great challenges in the fields of security, energy supply, climate change and migration.
Mr Sarkozy also sought to salve a wound inflicted on Hungary and its neighbours by his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who said the European Union's new member states "missed a good opportunity to keep quiet" when many of them backed the US-led invasion of Iraq.
"For France there is no old and new Europe. There are no major and minor countries," Mr Sarkozy told the Hungarian parliament by the river Danube. "There are not ones that have the right to speak and others that have to stay silent."
Mr Sarkozy, the son of a minor Hungarian aristocrat who fled Hungary after the second World War, said Europe must "reform, reform, reform" and insisted that France's presidency of the EU in the second half of 2008 would promote a programme of change.
"Europe cannot remain immobile, Europe has to take a step forward," he said. "I'd like the French presidency to be useful for Europe - we need to act together and we need to push Europe to act together."
Mr Sarkozy backed a common EU policy in defence and energy, saying the bloc had to be "independent and able to defend itself", and should reduce its dependency on Russian gas by investing in nuclear and renewable energy and by building the Nabucco gas pipeline, a long-planned project to bring gas to Europe from Turkey that would rival the Blue Steam pipeline backed by Moscow.
"It is not about replacing the Atlantic alliance with a European defence policy, but about creating two complementary systems," he said, adding that French energy utility Gaz de France was interested in helping build Nabucco, which is due to enter service in 2012. Mr Sarkozy also insisted that Hungary was a "special country" for him.
"It's not without some emotion that I talk in Hungary today," he said. My father never forgot his country, your country.
"I belong to a generation which grew up in the tradition of the events of Budapest in 1956 and the Prague in 1968," he said, referring to Hungarian and Czechoslovak uprisings against Soviet rule. "I always greatly valued the courage of the Hungarian people, who never gave up.
"[ Now] very much will be decided [ in this region] regarding how Europe is capable of developing economically."