The chairman of the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs, Elmar Brok, said that not all states in the region were at the same level of development. He singled out Croatia, saying it was making headway towards the EU unlike the neighbouring countries which still had to do their homework by adopting adjustment criteria so that they could catch up with Croatia.
Participants welcomed the European prospects of all states in the region regardless of the difficulties and problems they were encountering. It was underlined that Croatia was the most developed and had moved far away in both economic and political development and negotiations on EU accession.
Poland's representative said that due to its achievements Croatia deserved to participate in the 2009 elections for the European Parliament.
Croatian representative Gordan Jandrokovic underlined that Croatia should be evaluated individually on its road to the EU and that the result of the accession negotiations must be full membership. He added that Croatia supported trade liberalisation in Southeast Europe within the Central European Free Trade Agreement.
Jandrokovic said Croatia faced three key tasks -- to successfully lead the accession negotiations, to continue implementing reforms required for obtaining full EU membership as soon as possible, and to step up communication with members of the public so as to inform them of both the bad and the good sides of EU accession.
This was the fourth time that Croatia attended such meetings. Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia and Montenegro were invited for the first time because the meeting addressed the European prospects of Western Balkan countries.
The president of the Austrian Parliament's National Council, Andreas Kohl, said the EU could not be complete without the countries in the Balkans. He added that the European family of states needed all those countries as their stability and safety meant that Europe would be safe.
The chairman of the Austrian parliament's foreign affairs committee, Peter Schieder, said those states needed to be encouraged as they implemented reforms and drew closer to the EU.
The pace of adjustment and the realisation of the final goal, EU membership, depend on individual merits and the meeting of terms and demands of the Copenhagen criteria and the Stabilisation and Association process, he said.