Special report: Poland and the EU. A nervous new arrival on the European Union’s block

Date: 30/08/03

Poland is by far the biggest of the countries joining the European Union next year. But it must also do most to get into shape

“WITH hope and apprehension and anxiety and uncertainty,” replies one Polish official when asked how he views his country's entry into the European Union next year. The Polish people appear more enthusiastic: 77% said yes in June to joining the EU in a referendum with a 59% turnout, a strong showing by national standards. But within government the mood is more hesitant, even nervous. Officials worry that Poland has been slow in preparing for the administrative challenges of EU membership, and slow in fixing a clear strategy for advancing the country's interests within the Union.

The same could easily be said of other countries among the ten due to join the EU in May next year, eight of them from central Europe. But Poland is in a category of its own. With almost 40m people, it accounts for roughly half the population and half the GDP of all ten incoming countries. It will have more votes in the Council of Ministers, the EU's main legislature, than any country bar Britain, France, Germany and Italy. How Poland handles itself within the EU will be a matter of vital concern not only to Poland, but to all Europe too.

It may well be in for a rocky start. One foreign diplomat in Warsaw fears that Poland will fail to master all the EU's labyrinthine farming and food-safety laws by the time it joins, allowing other EU countries to block its farm exports, using what the EU calls “safeguard clauses”. It might also fail to muster enough well-planned and well-managed projects to claim its full share of EU development funds, leaving it a net payer into the EU budget. The result would be anger among Poland's millions of farm workers and Eurosceptics, playing into the hands of populist politicians such as Andrzej Lepper, a pro-small-farmer nationalist whose Samoobrona (Self-Defence) party vies for second place in the opinion polls behind the ruling Left Democratic Alliance, and who will be hoping to improve on his current 11% of parliamentary seats when Poland next goes to the polls. “If they are net payers, and if there are safeguard clauses, then it will be Lepper in 2005,” says the gloomy diplomat.

The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, will freshly assess Poland's preparations for entry in an annual report this autumn. Last year it said Poland needed to make “major efforts” in its farm sector, and expressed “serious concerns” about the country's veterinary standards. It reported progress in preparations to absorb structural funds, but said that administrative capacities still needed improving “substantially”.

Poland is likely to get more such warnings and urgings this year, especially on food safety. But civil servants fear that time is short and political leadership is weak. There is strikingly little enthusiasm for the struggling, unpopular, left-wing government of Leszek Miller, the prime minister. The installation of a new agriculture minister last month, at so delicate a stage in preparations for EU entry, can scarcely have helped.

Mr Miller stood back from the EU referendum campaign for fear of turning the vote into one on his own government. But when the happy surprise of a decisive result lifted the national mood, he set about profiting from it. He called an immediate vote of confidence, which his government won despite its minority in parliament, and he seems confident now of holding on to power until the next general election, due in 2005, an outcome far less likely before the referendum.

It is unclear what Mr Miller will do with power while he retains it. His government has been distracted and debilitated by scandals. Economic policy was hostage to a long confrontation between Mr Miller's economics minister, Jerzy Hausner, and his finance minister, Grzegorz Kolodko, until Mr Kolodko resigned on June 11th. Mr Hausner now needs to find ways of stimulating the economy, hit by slack demand from western Europe and falling investment, without feeding a budget deficit which approached 7% of GDP last year. The business cycle is turning up: the economy may grow by about 3% this year, against a miserable 1.3% achieved last year. But Poland's early entry into the euro zone, which would require a budget deficit of below 3% of GDP, seems less and less likely. Most analysts now expect it in 2009-10 at the earliest, rather than in 2007, as the Polish central bank would prefer.

The weak economy and the continuing scandals have encouraged a mood of national cynicism. Recent polls suggest that less than a quarter of the public supports Mr Miller's government. A perceived rise in corruption has sharpened disdain. More than two-thirds of Poles rank corruption as a big problem, against a half in 2000 and one-third in 1991.

Among Mr Miller's opponents, the have-nots tend to gravitate towards Mr Lepper, the haves to two opposition parties of the centre-right, Law and Justice, and Civic Platform. Further out on the right there is the League of Polish Families, a Catholic nationalist party which alone opposed EU entry.

The jockeying of these diverse opposition parties around a weak and demoralised government means little certainty about the direction or consistency of policy and little scope for the government to inspire or steer public opinion. Poles were in a pro-EU mood when they voted in June, but attachment to the trappings of sovereignty remains strong enough for the national mood to go lurching the other way if membership produces few clear benefits. Poland's ministers and diplomats could wish for better conditions at home when they are trying to signal confidently in Brussels what their country wants from the EU, and what it can offer the EU in exchange, in the long run.

The lack of vision in domestic politics and the fragile state of the economy mean that Poland will probably enter the EU looking mainly for short-term gains, preferably bankable ones, from any negotiation. “First priority, establish strength; second priority, use that strength,” says one Polish official, who makes no secret of his admiration for Spain's self-centred negotiating style when it joined the EU in 1986.

A louder voice, please

Even before it joins, Poland wants to defend the weighting of votes in the Council of Ministers fixed by the Nice treaty of 2001. This will give Poland (and Spain, which has roughly the same population) a generous 27 votes in the enlarged council when issues are decided by majority voting, only slightly less than the 29 votes apiece for Britain, France, Germany and Italy, which have much bigger populations. The EU's draft constitution, presented last month, proposes a new system: a simple majority of countries would be able to carry a vote in the council, so long as those in the majority represent at least three-fifths of the EU's population. Poland would lose clout under this system, so its opposition goes deep - much deeper than its other main professed worry about the draft constitution, the absence of any reference there to God, an argument that comes awkwardly from a country, however Catholic it may be, where the prime minister is an atheist and the president an agnostic.

Once in the EU, Poland will want to maximise the money it gets from the EU budget, mainly through farm subsidies and through the “structural funds” allocated to poorer countries and regions. It will also want to resist any new regimes and rules that impose higher costs or heavier burdens of regulation on business or government in areas such as the environment, labour, taxation, competition and state aids. Poland thinks it has enough on its plate complying with the existing EU rulebook, some parts of which it will need another 12 years to implement.

Poland accepts that Germany, the Union's main paymaster, will not agree to raise the legal limit on total EU budget spending above its current level: 1.27% of the EU's collective GDP. But with planned EU spending this year barely above 1% of GDP, Poland believes that it can and should be raised substantially in future years towards the legal ceiling to meet the development needs of new members.

Be fair to our farmers

Poland is also willing to accept the current rough breakdown whereby almost half of EU spending goes to agriculture, under the common agricultural policy, and one-third to the structural funds. But on agriculture, Poland wants to see its own farmers paid the same subsidies as those in current EU countries - which, under current plans, may not happen until 2013. It also wants the EU to direct more money towards rural development, even if that means giving less to actual farmers. These aims may bring conflict with France, the main beneficiary of the current system of farm subsidies, and with Britain, which would rather see the EU spend less of its money on agricultural subsidies in the first place.

The hopes of Poland, and of the other accession countries, for a big share of the EU's structural funds will also meet tough opposition. The countries getting a lot of cash now, led by Spain and Greece, will not want it cut off just because other, poorer countries are joining the Union. Nor will the countries picking up the bill want to pay out more to anybody. Poland thinks it can win Spain as an ally if it argues for phasing out (rather than cutting off) funds to regions now receiving them, alongside payments to new members. But precedent suggests that Spain will look first to its own interests, if money proves tight.

The getting and spending of quick money risks being the main activity by which Polish governments and Polish public opinion will measure the country's “success” in Europe. That makes for a dangerous course. Reversals are possible, given that Poland will be haggling against equally determined and more experienced countries in Brussels. For some other accession countries, integration into Europe is welcomed almost as an end in itself, but this line goes down much less well in Poland, where even those who favour EU integration tend also to have a strong attachment to national sovereignty. Poland's strong pro-Americanism tempers its European instincts as well. It does not want to go too deep into Europe, if that means leaving America behind.

Poland's attachment to its sovereignty need not mark it out much in Brussels, where all the big EU countries have come to favour co-operation among governments over more surrenders of power to the EU's supranational institutions. But reconciling strongly pro-American and pro-European policies, both of which Poland professes, will be more of a challenge for its diplomats. The Iraq war has helped divide the EU into admirers and resenters of American power, with Britain leading the first camp, France the second. Poland has entered the British camp, but would much rather the EU was not at odds with itself or with America. A choice between America and Europe is one “between mother and father - and we love them both,” says an official.

Pals with everyone, if possible

Poland has a useful ally in Britain, but it would be far more comfortable if Germany, too, was squarely in the pro-American camp. Poland had hoped and expected to find itself drawing closer to Germany as enlargement pushed the EU's centre of gravity eastward. Instead, Gerhard Schröder's government has been turning more towards France, opposing America's war in Iraq and even exploring a triangular alliance of sorts along with Russia. The Poles are dismayed, but they say Mr Schröder's anti-war stand has at least helped clarify their own policy for Europe. If even Germany is now considered an unreliable ally by America, the Polish thinking goes, then Poland must be a super-reliable one, so that America will not lose interest in continental Europe entirely.

Poland's tack in the EU will probably be to join in talk about a European security and defence policy, because it wants to be seen as a good European, but to do as little as possible in practice, at least until transatlantic relations improve dramatically. Poland's bottom line is that the EU should do nothing to diminish or challenge the role of NATO, which, for all the doubts about its future, still keeps Europe and America together. “It's the Poles and Hungarians and Czechs who are the 'old Europe' really,” snipes a German MP close to Mr Schröder. “They're the ones still wanting nuclear protection from the Russians.”

Polish officials twitch at the caricature. They say that NATO is a force for global security, that Russia is no threat to Poland, and that relations between Poland and Russia have never been better - which is probably true, if not saying all that much. But there remains an unspoken part of the Polish assessment. Russia may not be a threat on a one-year or five-year view, but on a 50-year view, who would dare make predictions? And whatever the possible threat, from near or far, Poland still sees America as its best ally.

When Poland sent troops to join America's invasion of Iraq, this was not so much to say thank you for past help but as “a modest investment in reciprocity” for the future, says one official. Public opinion opposed the gesture, but it seems to have worked out well enough for the government. Poland's prestige has risen, and no Polish lives were lost in the war. The experience of Iraq has made it easier, not harder, for Poland to support any future American military actions, says one western diplomat.

Don't forget our eastern friends

For all its Atlanticism, Poland sees the EU, too, playing a big part in its future security, but through foreign relations rather than defence policy. Poland wants to be inside the EU, but it wants the EU to roll on eastwards, stabilising and even embracing Poland's neighbours beyond. This year Poland has been arguing quietly for an “eastern dimension” to the EU's external policy, which would give Ukraine and Moldova - and perhaps even Belarus, if that country can shed or curb its near-dictator, Alexander Lukashenka - deeper ties with the EU. Privately, Poland hopes that they too can join the EU some day, though it hesitates to say so publicly. It wants them as prosperous, stable and accessible neighbours, not as poor and rackety ones cut off by an EU border. With Ukraine especially it shares much history, not all of it happily.

Poland is moving boldly, as an EU newcomer, in reaching for so delicate a dossier. But the European Commission has no very clear plans of its own for an Ostpolitik, and most EU governments are too busy worrying about next year's enlargement to think about adding even more countries later. Poland fears that unless it raises its voice now, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus will be relegated to a place among the many diverse countries with which the EU wants to have good neighbourly relations but which it rules out as future members.

One big problem in all this is that Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus are linked intimately to Russia, through the Soviet Union in past decades and through the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States now. Any policy for drawing them much closer to the EU would have to include some very good ideas for keeping Russia happy at the same time. It is hard to imagine what those ideas could be. Russia has no serious ambitions to join the EU, and economic recovery is helping its re-emergence as an effective regional power. It may resent talk that its proteges in the region would be better off under the EU's influence instead.

Poland's view seems to be that, even so, it has nothing to lose by prodding the EU to look east. One modest result could be more EU money for cross-border projects benefiting not only Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova but also the eastern provinces of Poland, which next year will become the poorest regions in the whole EU. And from Poland's point of view, almost any policy which encourages the EU to engage collectively with Russia will be better than the lack of an EU policy which leaves national capitals vying for Russia's favours.

If the EU can only export the “soft” security of democratic values and trade ties to its eastern hinterland, while America offers the “hard” security of smart bombs and nuclear shields through NATO, the fit for Poland could hardly look better. The two mechanisms might not always mesh perfectly, but that would be a secondary worry. “If you have the historical experience of Poland,” says Janusz Reiter, a Warsaw think-tank boss and former ambassador to Germany, “then you have a strong need of security.”