Davos tax talk fails to dent aggregator demand

By Robert Cottrell

Date: 03/02/05

Yes I did go to the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, and yes I did come back with lots of other people's ideas that I can pass off as my own, albeit most of them irrelevant to my usual line of work.

I heard arguments that higher taxes make us happier, by encouraging us to work less. I listened to experts on climate change and terrorism forecasting more of both. And I learnt that people smarter than me no longer waste time trawling through internet websites. They use programmes called 'aggregators' which chase information and bring back the new and interesting bits.

If you had turned an aggregator loose on Davos this year looking for news about central and eastern Europe, the yield would have been pretty thin.

There were no debates or dinners devoted exclusively to the region. Few of its leaders were there.

There was, however, one new star. It was Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine, waving his orange scarf and trailing behind him his new deputy prime minister for European integration, Oleh Rybachuk, a big man with a bone-crunching handshake who will take charge of Ukraine's new pro-EU foreign policy.

Not, of course, that Ukraine lacked a pro-EU foreign policy even under

Yushchenko's seedy predecessor, Leonid Kuchma. The trouble was that Kuchma's pro-EU policy applied only when he was talking to Europeans. For Russians, Kuchma had a pro-Russian foreign policy.

The overlap between the two policies got so confusing that even the Ukrainian government no longer knows exactly where its past commitments to Russia might conflict now with its aspirations to join the EU. It needs to go through the papers.

But Rybachuk says that at least the double-talk stops here. There will be no new deals with Russia which might obstruct EU integration.

The pro-EU foreign policy will translate into Russian too. I trust he is right. But he will have to keep his boss on message. Last week Yushchenko was still calling Russia a "strategic partner".

I have no idea what the policy content of that partnership might now be and I doubt that Yushchenko does either. Better, I would say, just to call Russia a "friend" and hope that this proves accurate.

Yushchenko needs to rein in his EU rhetoric too. The current informal deal between the EU and Ukraine, as I understand it, is that the EU will stop saying that it has no current plans for admitting Ukraine, if Ukraine can avoid making public demands to be let in quickly.

Yet there was Yushchenko at Davos saying that it was "essential" for Ukraine to begin membership negotiations in 2007.

The sooner that Rybachuk takes control of this dialogue, and postpones any public talk of dates or deadlines, the better.

I well remember a confrontation between Kuchma and Günter Verheugen, who was then enlargement commissioner, at a World Economic Forum meeting in Salzburg in 2002.

Kuchma, though badly shaken by political scandals at home, took the stage to make his usual appeal for a place on the EU's waiting-list. At which point Verheugen told Kuchma to his face, in front of a thousand or so people, that Ukraine had no prospect of joining the EU for at least the next 20 years, and that any European leader who came to Kiev and said differently was just lying for the sake of politeness.

Never before had I seen a civil servant tell a head of state to get stuffed, in public. It was a thrilling moment.

With Yushchenko, a much better man, now in charge of Ukraine, I would hate to see it repeated.

• Robert Cottrell is central Europe correspondent for The Economist

Article reports on the attendance of newly elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko at the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 2005.