Presidency sets out an exacting programme

Date: 02/07/1998

By Tim Jones

THE Austrian government has set a punishing timetable for breaking the back of intergovernmental negotiations over how best to overhaul the EU's spending programmes.

If Vienna manages to meet its ambitious schedule, key elements of the European Commission's Agenda 2000 reform package, including the financing of Union enlargement to the east, regional funding and farm subsidies, will be settled by the end of the Austrian presidency of the EU in December.

“It will be a very tight timetable,” said Austrian Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schüssel during a dinner with foreign journalists in Vienna to mark the beginning of his country's presidency. “I have decided that no General Affairs Council will go by without a debate on Agenda 2000.”

But he has already acknowledged that the vexed question of how the EU's budget should be funded will have to be solved under the German presidency in the first half of next year. Four nations, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria itself, are seeking a new system to compensate them for their large net contributions to the Union's budget.

Austrian Chancellor Viktor Klima said he wanted to present a “multi-level report” on Agenda 2000 to the Vienna summit in December. “This would outline the areas where we already agree, the areas where there is some agreement and those where we must work hard and focus ourselves to secure an agreement,” he explained.

Klima also pledged to keep employment at the top of the agenda during his presidency. But while he stressed the importance of establishing an effective overall action plan to redirect Union policies in favour of job creation, he pointed out that, in Austria at least, “people are more interested that their national action plan is carried out”.

Eleonora Hostasch, the social affairs minister who drafted the Austrian national plan which aims to cut unemployment to 3.5&percent; of the workforce, promised to give job-generating policies a major push during her country's presidency.

Both Klima and Schüssel also pledged to defend the rights and interests of children during their term at the EU helm. This would mean seeking early international agreements to curb the proliferation of child pornography on the Internet, restricting child labour in developing countries and meting out punishment to regimes which recruit children as soldiers.

Schüssel's deputy, Foreign Affairs State Secretary Benita Ferrero-Waldner, said Austria would also work hard to unblock the financial aid which has long been earmarked for Turkey but vetoed by the Greek government. The Cardiff summit in June came up with a new proposal to allow this aid to be freed by qualified majority vote rather than a unanimous decision.

Klima claimed that Austria's first presidency had caused great excitement among the Austrian people. “I have actually been trying to dampen down the enthusiasm,” he said. “I feared people were expecting too much.”