‘Second-wave’ applicants protest over delay to talks

Date: 02/12/1999

By Simon Taylor

APPLICANT countries in the 'second wave' are expressing growing concern that they will not be able to start enlargement negotiations with the EU until March next year at the earliest.

Slovakia is especially worried that a delay in launching entry talks would threaten its chances of catching up with the front-runner countries in the enlargement process.

Officials have confirmed that the European Commission and EU governments are discussing two options for starting negotiations with five more central and east European countries and Malta during next year's Portuguese presidency.

Under the timetable outlined by Enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen to MEPs last week, the six countries would be invited to a special accession conference to be held towards the end of March. This would launch entry talks on areas of EU legislation such as culture and youth policies which have posed few difficulties in negotiations with the front-runners.

But the outgoing head of the Commission's enlargement service has proposed a different schedule under which talks would not start until nearer the end of the Portuguese presidency. Klaus van der Pas has recommended that a series of meetings should be held to assess candidates' readiness to start talks after an initial session in March. This could mean that formal negotiations would not begin until May or June.

This has, however, sparked protests from some of the second-wave candidates. "If we were to start in June with only a small number of chapters, then it would be impossible for us to catch up," Bratislava's ambassador to the EU Juraj Migas told European Voice.

Some applicant countries are pushing for entry talks to start in January or February to ensure that they can make significant progress on a substantial number of chapters by June. "It is very frustrating to have to wait because we could be ready to start negotiations now. It would help our preparations if we knew how the Commission wants to handle this," said one diplomat.

Malta and Slovakia are particularly keen to make up the ground lost as a result of the decision to exclude them from the group of six counties invited to start formal talks at last December's Vienna summit. By the end of this year, the countries in the first wave will have opened negotiations on 24 chapters - well over half of all the subjects to be tackled.

Commission sources say that the move to delay the launch of talks reflects the needs to carry out a fresh assessment of each applicant's level of preparation for EU membership.

The Commission intends to start work on a new analysis of all 12 candidate's progress in sectors where EU legislation has changed over the last two years in January. This is likely to take three months as it will involve more than half the chapters which have already been tackled in the talks.

Applicant countries in the 'second wave' are expressing growing concern that they will not be able to start enlargement negotiations with the EU until March 2000 at the earliest.