Enlargement strategy confusion

Date: 18/12/1997

By Mark Turner

EU LEADERS may have managed to design a political fudge at their weekend summit to mollify the Union's less-advanced applicants, but it is still far from clear how the enlargement process will actually be managed.

Administrators in the European Commission's central and eastern European arm face the prospect of huge overhauls during the next six months and a far from certain management strategy.

Many of the 150 staff in the institution's Phare unit, which runs the Union's technical assistance programme in eastern Europe, are to be shared out between an enlargement task force, the Commission's new external funding unit SCOOP, enlarged delegations to the applicant countries and (possibly) the EU's internal market assistance office TAIEX.

Those left behind will, in theory, form a far more strategy-oriented Phare unit, but will be geographically and institutionally removed from the practical end of their decisions.

Although administrators accept the need for change, they fear that, in practice, the reform will be badly managed and stretch resources too thinly.

SCOOP, for example, is bidding for around 60 eastern European experts to exert financial control and implement Phare projects - almost half the existing unit's personnel.

But no one knows who will be chosen, when they will move, whether or not new administrators will be drafted in to help, or even why the shake-up is happening at all.

"This is a totally insane set-up," said one insider. "These changes are being done for the right reasons, but to move people around like this is going to create massive confusion. The Commission has shot itself in both feet and one of its knees as well."

Although new Phare head Catherine Day has helped smooth the process somewhat, even senior Commission sources admit that the institution has not done a good job in explaining the changes to its staff.

Some middle-ranking officials believe that the upper echelons of the Commission are blind to the problems they are causing.

"The Commissioners are totally unaware of these difficulties," said one, who claimed that Günter Burghardt, head of the central and eastern European and foreign policy directorate-general, "only wants to indulge in Ferrero-Rocher diplomacy and has no concept of operational realities".

Cabinet members were this week unwilling to discuss the potential pitfalls of the next few months publicly, but directorate-general officials said that they were circulating an inter-service strategy document for release early next year.

The Commission's general inspectorate of services is also examining the EU's foreign services unit by unit and hopes to give SCOOP some clear recommendations next spring. But even that process is in some doubt, as the body's architect Philippe Soubestre wages a pitched battle over its size and power.

He is not being helped by ambitious officials frantically jockeying for positions in hard-core policy units, desperate not to be tarred with the 'operational' stigma they feel SCOOP would give them.

On the other side of the fence, many officials from the EU's applicant countries also view the twin requirements of a totally new Phare management system and enlargement negotiations with serious misgivings.

Given the lack of suitably trained staff, coping with the procedure could be more than some governments can manage - even though they would never admit it in public.

"This will all place an enormous administrative burden on the applicants," admitted a Phare official.

TAIEX officials promise that they will help by providing access to databases and monitoring the candidates' legislative progress. The new Phare programme also promises aid in the form of administrative-twinning schemes, which would give central and eastern European ministries the benefit of western expertise.

But even that proposal is under fire. First, there is a lack of freely available officials in the west, and secondly there is a political battle brewing over which applicants should get which member state's staff.

While everyone would be delighted with Germans, French or British functionaries, they are less excited (rightly or wrongly) at the prospect of receiving Greeks or Portuguese.

Commission is in the middle of a major administrative organisation for its CEEC operations.