Europe ‘cannot become an exclusive club’: Polish president
PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki
10.10.2018 13:00
Europe “cannot become an exclusive club,” while a community in the European Union can only be built “by loyal cooperation of states equal in their rights,” the Polish president has said.
Polish President Andrzej Duda speaks at the University of Zurich on Tuesday. Photo: PAP/Jacek Turczyk
Speaking at the University of Zurich in Switzerland on Tuesday evening, Andrzej Duda said that “respect for every country and equal rights of all states are the foundations of the uniting Europe.”
He also said during a lecture that “each state has an equal right to self-determination” and that “this right must be protected in Europe.”
Duda added that “the European Union should respect the freedom of debate and political choices.”
The Polish president said that European integration “must be first and foremost based on our common effort to redress … inequalities in order to provide a level playing field.”
“Our history teaches us, Europeans, that the ‘concert of powers’ always leads to conflicts and bloodshed,” Duda said during his lecture, entitled The Future of Europe: The Foundations of Unity of the States of Europe, which he delivered 72 years after former British leader Winston Churchill called for the creation of a “United States of Europe” in a speech at the same venue.
Churchill’s September 1946 address at the University of Zurich was widely seen as a starting point of European integration, Poland's PAP news agency reported.
The full text of the speech delivered by Duda at the University of Zurich on Tuesday is available here.
(gs/pk)
Source: PAP, president.pl