Tackling the structural monologue

Date: 22/02/1996

RARELY has the whispering jury in the corridors of power returned its verdict so unanimously.

A good year after its formal launch in Essen and more than two after its inception in Copenhagen, the structural dialogue between the EU and its Eastern European membership candidates is signally failing to work.

The meetings, say officials, have degenerated into exercises generating a degree of boredom exceptional even by the generous standards of international diplomacy.

The nine Eastern and Central European ministers who faithfully turn up in the wake of general affairs or other meetings of EU ministers usually use their very few minutes of allotted speech time to rattle off a series of statistics, says a close observer.

Inevitably, the figures have been carefully chosen to illustrate how swiftly the country has been travelling ahead on the road to EU membership.

“In some ways, it reminds one a little of old Soviet habits, with government officials describing by how many percentage points they over-achieved against their initial planning,” said one EU official.

Usually, the hapless host on these occasions - the minister representing the presidency - has his own set speech to deliver. After that, politely stifling his yawns, he will sit through the two to three hours of the meeting wondering what he might tell the few journalists who bother to turn up for the subsequent press conference. As always, and to the extreme irritation of the Eastern Europeans, no other full-blown EU minister will have chosen to stay.

“What precisely has not happened so far at these meetings is any real dialogue,” says an EU official.

“In fact, set against the goal of facilitating the Eastern European countries' future membership, you might call what we have seen a 'structural monologue'. The Eastern Europeans all try to paint themselves in the best possible light, and compete against each other for EU approval.”

Yet it would be unfair, EU sources acknowledge, to lay the blame for the lack of exchange too squarely on the Eastern Europeans' doorstep.

“The meetings need to be better prepared on our side as well,” says one participant. “Since any subject may be raised at any given meeting, what you get is a gathering of badly-briefed ministers, none of whom has a clear picture of what is really going on.”

One senior Eastern European diplomat commented: “It is not easy to get our ministers to speak freely, with such a broad range of subjects liable to be broached.” But this, he insists, goes for the Western side too. “The competence of the presiding minister has a clear impact and that can strongly vary from presidency to presidency.”

After a year of largely fruitless exchanges and growing irritation on all sides, the EU machinery has finally creaked into action. Responding to the widespread criticism, EU ambassadors recently adopted a set of proposals deemed to improve the chances of real dialogue.

Acknowledging the failure of the initial concept of a wide-ranging, free-wheeling debate, the new idea is to revert to a more traditional approach and establish a detailed yearly schedule for the ministerial talks.

Each meeting is to be focused around a limited number of subjects, thus enabling ministers to be properly briefed.

Furthermore, the Commission is to prepare each session with a discussion paper. After approval by the Council of Ministers' specialist working group on Central Europe and the EU ambassadors in Coreper, this would be presented to the Eastern partners early enough for them to come up with an initial reaction even ahead of the meeting itself.

EU ambassadors and their Eastern partners hope this strategy will ensure the structural dialogue finally gains some sort of substance.

It should also enable the presidency to come up with more meaningful “concluding remarks” after each encounter, and thus rescue the process from the media oblivion into which it has sunk so embarrassingly. The silence surrounding the structural dialogue has been all the more awkward since it was launched with a great fanfare by the German EU presidency in 1994, which touted it far and wide as one of its major achievements.

The first time the new approach is to be put into practice is next Tuesday (27 February), the day after the General Affairs Council.

For this first ministerial meeting to be held within the structural dialogue framework in 1996, the plan is to focus on three subjects: the peace process in former Yugoslavia, the Eastern partners' involvement in the forthcoming conference on EU reform and the overhaul of the structural dialogue itself.

Similarly, a tentative list of specific subjects has been established for the subsequent ministerial meetings to be held during the Italian presidency (environment, Ecofin and research on 5, 11 and 25 March respectively, agriculture on 21 May and culture on 11 June).

While all parties welcome the fact that some action has finally been taken, diplomats and other officials, when pressed, sound rather sceptical about the chances for a quantum leap in the quality of the exchanges.

“The trouble is that the EU's agenda gets more and more crowded with meetings, all of which are perfectly justifiable,” said one close observer.

“But how can you have a meaningful dialogue between the EU and nine different countries, each of which wants to speak, during a meeting lasting three hours at best.”

Yet allowing more time for such meetings, diplomats say, is hardly practicable. Each hour of talks granted to the Eastern partners immediately triggers cries for similar treatment from other membership hopefuls, such as Cyprus or Malta, or even from the small handful of EFTA countries that have not joined the EU.

EU pressure to streamline the debate by getting at least some Eastern Europeans to agree on common positions, and perhaps even select a spokesman to speak for several countries on a given subject, has so far failed to produce results. All membership candidates, diplomats say, have met such attempts with reactions varying from outrage to sullen resistance.

“If you ask the Czechs to work out a common position with the Bulgarians, they will tell you to go to the devil,” says an EU observer. “After four decades of being treated as part of a bloc, these countries are fed up with being lumped together.”

Despite some tangible achievements (such as the setting up of a computer-linked data exchange system to speed up the East Europeans' adaptation to the EU's single market legislation), diplomats on both sides know that the structural dialogue's real function will remain largely symbolic and political.

“There is no way we can pre-empt the nitty-gritty of membership negotiations,” says a EU observer.

Indeed, the extreme reluctance of Eastern Europeans to coordinate their approach to the EU means that the ministerial association councils held with individual partners will, in all likelihood, remain the better framework for tackling concrete problems.

And whatever further changes the EU might agree to in an attempt to improve the structural dialogue, no country seems ready to do away with the one crucial limitation: EU governments are so far adamant that, within that particular framework, no firm decision shall ever be taken.