Enlargement talks set to cause major headaches

Date: 01/07/1999

By Simon Taylor

FINLAND needs no lectures on the importance of relations with its eastern neighbours, given that it was part of the Russian empire until 1918.

It is not surprising, therefore, that work on bringing the former Communist bloc countries into the Union fold is a priority for the incoming Finnish presidency. Only last week, European Affairs Minister Kimo Sassi told the Latvian Prime Minister Vilis Kristopans: "EU enlargement is a key issue for the Finnish presidency because it is vital for peace and stability in Europe."

The enlargement process presents the Finns with two major challenges: maintaining the pace of negotiations with the six leading applicants and deciding which additional countries to invite to the negotiating table at the Helsinki summit in December.

Keeping up the momentum behind the talks will be easier said than done. Although negotiations have started on 15 of the 31 chapters of Union legislation, even the best-performing candidate - Cyprus - has only managed to close ten of them.

The next set of talks will be even more difficult to conclude as some of the most problematic issues surrounding enlargement will come up during the Finns' term at the EU helm. Many fear that issues such as Hungary's bid to extend its ban on foreigners buying farm land for ten years after joining the Union will make rapid progress impossible.

Agreeing terms of entry in the environmental sphere also promises to give the Finns some serious headaches because the candidate countries will need years to meet EU standards on air and water quality. Decades of unregulated heavy industrial production have left countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic with a major task in cleaning up pollution problems.

As if that was not enough, the Helsinki summit will have to take the difficult decision as to which of the other five hopefuls should start formal negotiations.

Before the Kosovo crisis, EU governments insisted that an invitation to the negotiating table would depend only on a country's degree of readiness for membership, to be assessed by the European Commission in the next set of its regular reports on each applicant which are due out in October.

But the lessons of the Kosovo crisis underlined the need to bind south and east European countries into Euro-Atlantic political structures or run the risk of regional conflicts in Europe's backyard.

EU governments are now saying that political considerations are more important than technical ones, increasing the chances that all the applicant countries in the 'second wave' will be invited to start negotiations at the end of this year.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said on a recent visit to Romania - universally seen as the weakest applicant - that even Bucharest could start talks after December. The news was welcomed in all the second-wave candidate countries because the UK was formerly seen as putting 'objective criteria' above all else.

Even without this change of emphasis, Finland and the other Scandinavian member states would have fought tooth and nail to get Latvia and Lithuania to join neighbouring Estonia in the group of negotiating countries because of traditional trading links with the Baltic states.

EU governments believe that although Romania and Bulgaria are lagging behind the other applicants in making the political and economic changes necessary to enter the EU, not inviting them to launch talks in Helsinki would risk undermining political efforts in those countries to keep on the difficult reform path.

One option being discussed unofficially would be to tell both Sofia and Bucharest that they can begin talks later, or to link the start of talks to the fulfilment of certain conditions. Diplomats from one of the two countries say that provided there is a firm commitment to start negotiations, they will be happy.

Malta also looks likely to make up the ground it lost when it withdrew its application for EU membership by being invited to join the party in December.