Kosovo raises enlargement hopes

Date: 22/07/1999

The conflict in Kosovo has had a dramatic impact on the attitudes of all those involved in enlarging the EU. But while the political will to expand the Union is stronger than ever, the first new members are still unlikely to join before 2004-5. Simon Taylor explains why

POLITICAL thinking on the enlargement of the EU will never be the same again after the war in Kosovo.

Any reservations which existing member states might have had about the need to bring the Union's central and east European neighbours into the EU fold were swept away by the events in Yugoslavia, which illustrated that the Union could not afford to keep these countries on the political fringes of Europe.

But the promise of closer ties made to countries such as Albania and Macedonia has sent a shiver through the applicant states which are hoping the join the EU in the next five years.

Without a doubt, the political will among Union leaders to enlarge is stronger than ever. But in the run-up to the crucial Helsinki summit in December, there is intense speculation as to whether Kosovo will accelerate or delay enlargement.

While politicians in the applicant countries are adamant that the conflict has reinforced the case for expanding the Union, others believe that the fall-out from the Serbian conflict could slow the process significantly.

Poland's President Aleksander Kwasniewski is among those who believe that the war in Kosovo has made expansion of the Union more difficult. "Kosovo has not made EU membership easier," he told European Voice, arguing that the NATO air-strikes had made the public more cautious about new challenges such as enlargement. He even attributes the recent low turnout in the European Parliament elections to the military campaign against Milosevic's Serb forces. "When voters are faced with problems, the reaction is to stay at home," he claimed.

But, at the same time, Poland's Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek insists that the conflict has made admitting new countries into the EU even more important. "The crisis in Kosovo, on top of Bosnia, emphasises the importance of enlargement. It gives urgency to the accession of the associated countries," he says.

IN ONE sense, he is right. One direct effect of the Kosovo crisis has been to move the enlargement process up a gear. After offering struggling states such as Albania and Macedonia the prospect of closer ties with the Union, EU leaders then felt obliged to make a generous offer to Romania and Bulgaria, which are lagging behind in the group of six 'second-wave' countries hoping to be invited to begin formal negotiations at the Helsinki summit.

Strong candidates in this group, such as Latvia and Malta, will race to catch up the lost ground once they start talks next year. But front runners like Poland and Hungary will seek to put more distance between themselves and the rest of the pack.

It remains difficult, however, to see how the enlargement process can be made to move any quicker in practical terms.

The EU's chief negotiator Klaus van der Pas is among those who firmly believe that the pace of the negotiations cannot be stepped up, even though his unit is about to get more staff. "There is no possibility of speeding up the process," he insists. "That would mean opening more chapters per presidency, ie producing more draft common positions, but there is a limit on our ability to absorb the positions that the applicant countries present to us and on their ability to produce new positions."

So far, the six leading applicant countries have started talks on 14 of the 31 areas of EU legislation which the candidates have to comply with by the time they join. The Finns are planning to maintain the momentum by opening talks on a further eight chapters during their six-month presidency.

But progress is certain to slow over the next 18 months, making it hard to see how the applicant countries can keep to the strict deadlines for entry they have set themselves.

Difficult subjects on the horizon include the right to buy farmland, the challenge of meeting Union environment standards and the right of people from the applicant countries to go and seek work in EU countries.

Poland last week underlined just how painful the negotiations over farm issues will be when it asked for an 18-year delay before it has to allow foreigners to buy agricultural land.

A fierce tussle is also in prospect over Warsaw's demand for its share of the direct payments made to EU farmers to compensate them for price cuts, arguing that to do otherwise would mean discriminating against Polish farmers.

What is more, from next year the Union wants to reopen talks on areas of EU policy on which negotiations have already been provisionally closed - a move which can only delay the end point for the horse-trading over entry terms.

Part of this exercise will involve ensuring that the applicant countries are carrying out their pledges to introduce EU laws and implement them properly.

Van Der Pas acknowledges that the lack of trust this implies has caused resentment in the candidate countries, but insists that it is in their interests to raise any problems during the negotiations. "What if member states say an applicant country is not capable of handling part of the acquis and they cannot sign the accession treaty? The political fall-out would be disastrous," he argues.

The potential problems that this additional stage will pose make it unlikely that the negotiations will be wrapped up by the end of the Swedish presidency in the first half of 2001, as some hope.

Even when the negotiations are completed, it will take 12-18 months for the national parliaments in the current and prospective member states to ratify the accession terms for new members. This makes the candidate countries' target entry dates of 2002 or 2003 look over-optimistic to the tune of one or two years.

Another complicating factor is that the negotiations on the next round of trade liberalisation will reach a crucial stage in 2003.

If, as expected, the EU is forced to make further changes to the Common Agricultural Policy to meet the demands from liberalising countries such as the US and Australia, these reforms will feed into the talks with applicant countries if negotiations over terms of entry are still continuing.

This could, in fact, make it easier to bring in Poland, with its huge farm population, by switching support from production to rural development, which benefits people in country areas whether or not they work in agriculture. As the Polish government itself admits, the country's 10 million farmers are mainly a social problem, not an agricultural one.

But even if the World Trade Organisation deal makes Polish accession easier in one sense, it will almost certainly complicate the negotiations leading up to Union membership.

ADDED to all of this is the challenge of deciding how to handle Cyprus' bid to join the Union. The Mediterranean island is already leading the field in terms of its readiness to become a full EU member.

But the political dispute with Turkey over the divided island's status shows no sign of being resolved, despite recent initiatives within the United Nations and the G7 group of industrialised nations to find a solution.

Decisions on enlargement require the unanimous support of all 15 existing EU member states, and Greece has already made it clear that it will prevent any other applicants from joining without Cyprus. But Turkey has warned that if Cyprus enters the Union, it will declare the occupied part of the island Turkish territory.

So again, it will require a massive amount of political will for the EU to take in Cyprus against the wishes of Turkey. It may even have to give Ankara a major concession to calm feelings in the volatile region.

Despite all these problems, the Kosovo crisis has had a fundamental impact on the enlargement process, which is now seen less as a dry technocratic exercise and more as a historic political challenge.

"Kosovo makes the geopolitical argument more important, compared to the legal, technocratic approach," says Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, advisor on EU affairs to Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek.

This sea change is crucial. Unless EU leaders have the courage to make the leap and sell the politically difficult prospect of enlargement to their voters, the applicant countries may never realise their dream of returning to the European fold from which they were brutally excluded when world powers split the continent at Yalta in 1945.

Major feature. The conflict in Kosovo has had a dramatic impact on the attitudes of all those involved in enlarging the EU. But while the political will to expand the Union is stronger than ever, the first new members are unlikely to join before 2004-5.