High praise for applicant questionnaires

Date: 05/09/1996

By Mark Turner

COMMISSION officials who remained at their desks during August to begin the task of sifting through 50,000 pages of information supplied by would-be EU members have praised the applicant countries for the quality of their replies.

While most fonctionnaires were busy sunning themselves during the August hiatus, some 300 Commission officials stayed behind to begin processing the candidate countries' responses to a 165-page questionnaire distributed in April.

Every directorate-general maintained a crew dedicated to the task of wading through the mountain of raw information proffered by the ten applicant countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs).

The answers will help the Commission to assess their bids to join the EU.

Although they were given just three months to complete the hugely complex document, all ten countries surprised even the most optimistic with prompt and - for the most part - well-drafted responses.

“The first impression is that a very serious effort went into the replies,” said one source close to the Commission. “There was an enormous amount of work put in.”

Initial reactions are positive. “There was no country with any major difficulty,” said a Commission source, although he added that there were “certain gaps and misunderstandings”.

These often resulted from confusion over the more arcane elements of EU jargon, which continued to bamboozle respondents despite numerous briefing sessions. One example was the Baltic misunderstanding of 'set-aside' land, an inapplicable concept in countries where the priority is to increase production as fast as possible.

Others were caused by a simple lack of information. In some states, records only began in 1991. In the case of Slovakia, this was made even more complex by the discovery that certain secret old treaties were still locked up in safe boxes in Prague.

One Commission source suggested that some interesting lacunae could be found in the section on nuclear energy, which probed issues of nuclear safety and surveillance of radioactivity.

Nevertheless, the omissions and mistakes were not a cause for serious concern, according to analysts who face the task of judging the CEECs' applications according to three general criteria: the stability of democratic institutions, a functioning market economy and the ability to take on the obligations of EU membership.

But its first challenge was more physical than logistical. Hungary's paperwork alone is reputed to have weighed 200kg and a “little truck” had to be drafted in for the job.

External Relations Commissioner Hans Van Den Broek wants draft avis - assessments of each country's application to the Union - prepared by the end of the year. Only once this has been done will discussions on accession leave the technical sphere and enter the political arena.