Commission prepares to analyse mountain of enlargement replies

Date: 11/07/1996

COMMISSION officials are currently gearing up for the onslaught of a tidal wave of paperwork put together by hundreds of government officials in Bucharest, Budapest, Tallinn, Ljubljana and Prague.

With 26 July set as the target date for applicant countries to hand in their answers to the Commission's enlargement questionnaires, all the Central and Eastern European membership candidates have signalled that they expect to meet the deadline.

According to officials, this includes Slovenia, the last country formally to join the club of EU aspirants.

In theory, the Slovenians were unable to start work on their replies to the questionnaire before they officially received it after the country's Europe Agreement with the Union was signed on 10 June, nearly six weeks after the other enlargement candidates were handed the 160-page document.

However, EU sources say Ljubljana was handed an advance copy of the questionnaire by “a friendly country”, and started to work on it even before the Europe Agreement was finally signed.

With small variations such as the editing out of questions on the fisheries sector for land-locked countries such as Hungary, the questionnaire is the same for all ten Central and East European enlargement candidates.

Officials say that after the initial shock of being given barely three months to answer 160 pages of questions such as “does your anti-trust law contain horizontal and vertical provisions?” and “what are your investment needs in the energy sub-sectors?”, the candidate countries swiftly began drafting their answers.

For some newly independent countries such as the Baltic states, the questionnaire has led to the biggest statistical stock-taking exercise ever undertaken.

Several countries, such as Hungary, are planning to publish their replies as a first major survey of their country's economic and political development in the seven years since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Commission officials say the answers to the questionnaires will provide the main source for the drafting of the politically highly-sensitive recommendations (avis) on each enlargement candidate's suitability for membership of the Union.

The avis are to be published along with a global study of the enlargement challenge and its impact on the Union after the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Conference, which is not expected before the spring of 1997 at the earliest.

This means the Commission and membership candidates will have to cooperate closely over the coming months in regularly updating the statistical data, some of which might quickly become obsolete as the economies of Central and Eastern Europe continue their rapid transformation.

However, Commission officials acknowledge their own work in evaluating the 2,000 to 3,000 pages of information each membership candidate is expected to submit will not relieve the Union of the burden of making the decision about whom to take in first.

“There will be a highly political decision about the ultimate content of the avis, which will be taken at Commission level,” explained one official.

“A draft will be submitted - possibly suggesting different and alternative wordings - but the ultimate responsibility will lie with the Commissioners themselves.”

Whatever the avis, Union governments will remain free to overrule the Commission's recommendations and take a decision according to their own strategic political and economic priorities, as happened in the case of Greece, which did not initially receive a favourable Commission opinion.