Timetable for expansion starts to slip

Date: 15/06/2000

By Simon Taylor

THERE is a sweet irony in the fact that it is France which will oversee the process of deciding whether the first wave of EU enlargement takes place in the near future.

After all, if President Jacques Chirac had delivered on his promises, Poland would already be the 16th member of the Union.

After the phoney war in the enlargement process of the last six months, the incoming French presidency faces a double challenge. It has to deliver a package of internal reforms to ensure that an EU of up to 28 member states can continue to take decisions effectively, and it must move the negotiating process from a polite exchange of information into a no-holds barred contest between member states and the leading applicant countries.

French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has already reignited the explosive debate about when the first wave of enlargement could take place by promising the six front-runners that EU governments will be in a position to set a date for the end of negotiations by the time Union leaders meet in Nice in December.

But politicians in other EU capitals have already poured cold water on Jospin's eagerness to pacify the increasingly frustrated governments in Warsaw and Budapest. Enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen has led the chorus of voices arguing that it will be impossible to fix a timetable so soon. Instead, the European Commission is proposing to draw up a scoreboard by the autumn, setting out exactly how much more work each applicant has to do before it is ready to join the Union.

This strategy has been devised in response to the biggest threat to an early enlargement which has emerged in the last six months - Poland's poor performance.

Even though Warsaw has issued dire warnings about the political fallout which would result from missing its 2003 target date for entry, arguing that it would hit economic growth in Poland and its EU neighbours, the word in the corridors of powers in Brussels is that the slow pace of reform means an early enlargement is simply not on the cards.

Hopes that the Polish parliament, the Sejm, would speed up the passage of new legislation and improve the quality of the bills which do go through suffered a severe set-back with last week's decision by the Freedom Union party, the junior partner in Poland's three-way coalition, to leave the government.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth could be heard across Brussels because Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz's aggressively free-market Freedom Party was seen as the best hope for getting the reform mill turning properly again.

Frustration with Poland has been intensified by the long-running battle to try to strike a deal to end the country's import duties. In exchange, the EU is offering to wind up the subsidises on exports of farm products such as pigmeat and grains which have resulted in Polish farmers taking to streets to protest at unfair competition.

The failure to strike a deal with the Polish government, hamstrung by the influence of the opposition pro-farmer Peasants' Party (PSL), has reinforced the belief that agriculture will be the biggest single obstacle to enlargement in the near future.

After all, if Poland cannot sign up to a modest liberalisation package now - despite the political pressure the Commission is exerting - how can it realistically expect to cut the number of farmers in the country by half over the next six years, as envisaged under its agricultural restructuring programme?

Enlargement without Poland is unthinkable, given its size and its importance to Germany. As a result, concern about Warsaw's performance has fuelled speculation that the first wave of expansion will take place at least two and possibly three years later than envisaged by the applicant countries.

As the candidates appear to be winning the argument about their right to support payments for their farmers, fears are being stirred up that the EU might have to find an extra €8 billion to fund the aid - a sum which was not included in last year's seven-year Union budget deal in Berlin.

EU governments themselves will also have to jump through a number of very difficult hoops before they are ready to allow new members to join their ranks.

Although all existing member states agree on the need for internal reforms to prepare the Union's decision-making mechanisms for enlargement, the French presidency still faces a tough job to find a new way to share out power in an EU of up to 28 members.

Its task is not helped by the fact that there will be so many losers as the number of votes wielded by each member state in the Council of Ministers, the number of Commissioners and national vetoes are all scaled back in an attempt to avoid institutional paralysis in an expanded Union.

Even once the new arrangements have been finalised, it will take at least another year for governments to get them approved by their national parliaments, making the 2002 target date for the EU itself to be ready for expansion look rather ambitious.

When that process has been completed, parliaments will then have to endorse any decision to admit new members - a process which could take 18 months - despite pressure from the applicant countries to ratify the bills needed for the new Union treaty and enlargement in parallel.

But even if the candidates' 2002 'deadline' could be met, a huge question mark remains over the willingness of EU governments themselves to move the negotiations from the paper-shuffling to the unavoidable table-thumping stage.

The debate over minor issues such as the language to be used in the Union's negotiating paper on the free movement of workers and Spain's attempts to hold up serious debate on access to the EU's massive regional aid budget suggest that the pace at which negotiations are completed will depend entirely on member states' willingness to make painful - and politically costly - sacrifices for the sake of enlargement.

Part of the problem is that this is a project primarily designed to ensure peace and security in Europe, and it is therefore very difficult to describe its tangible benefits to a sceptical public.

It remains to be seen whether the €150 million earmarked by the Commission for an information campaign on enlargement will be enough to win the argument. The fears of voters in Germany and Austria that admitting new members will result in a flood of cheap labour, more illegal immigration and organised crime will be difficult to overcome.

Taking all these factors into account, the odds seem stacked against an enlargement before 2005 or 2006.

While such slippage could provoke a political backlash in the leading candidate countries, it could have a silver lining for the six other applicants which only started negotiations this year.

Although they will probably have begun talks on only around half the policy areas which must be tackled in the accession talks by December - while the front-runners will have broached every issue - it is clear that the rate at which chapters are closed will slow considerably as the most difficult subjects are addressed. This will offer the perfect opportunity for well-prepared second wavers to catch up.

Like an overdue baby, the first wave of enlargement may be late but when it happens, it should be bigger than expected.

Major feature.