Kinnock sees transport as key to CEEC development

Date: 02/05/1996

By Tim Jones

AMID all the sound and fury over aviation agreements with the United States, clashes with Austria over tolls and controversy over state aids to lame duck airlines, another key area of EU transport policy has hardly attracted any attention.

Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock ran into a storm in a political teacup earlier this year after remarks from a supposedly private speech, in which he suggested that the target date of 2000 for EU enlargement was unrealistic, were accidentally published.

For Kinnock, there are too many warm words spoken about encouraging Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) into the Union while too little concrete action is taken.

In an attempt to bring this to an end in his policy area, Kinnock has begun a series of tours - starting with Poland last week and to be followed by a trip to Hungary at the end of this month - to discuss how best to create a common transportation market throughout the continent of Europe.

“I do not suggest that the building and renewal of roads and railways, of airports and harbours are the only necessary components of the advance to prosperity in the east of Europe,” he said recently. “I do say, however, that transport systems are tangible, usable evidence of progress.”

In the words of one aide, “transport is a practical area where enlargement will be judged”.

Transportation is unfinished business from the association agreements signed with Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and the three Baltic states.

While the agreements contained commitments to opening up the maritime sector and some market access, they also called for further negotiations towards bilateral accords on civil aviation and inland transport.

Within this framework, the Commission has submitted proposals to transport ministers, asking for mandates to negotiate agreements on civil aviation and road transport both for freight and passenger traffic.

While the question of aviation has been debated by transport ministers, winning a mandate for a common aviation area seems far off. A step towards this goal was taken in 1992, when the EU's package of liberalisation measures was extended to Norway and Sweden and then to Austria, Finland and Iceland with the creation of the European Economic Area.

“This is, of course, very welcome, but bringing in these outside countries really underlined the isolation of the CEECs,” said a diplomat.

The delays in reaching agreements even with the most advanced of the CEECs - such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic - reflect scepticism among many Union transport ministers that they will be able to live up to the stringent demands that even some EU airlines are finding hard to meet.

“These airlines and systems were completely state-controlled for a long time,” said a diplomat. “Asking them to take a sudden plunge into this open market could not only hurt them, but could also hurt some of the weaker EU airlines, and not many people want that.”

Once the mandates are drawn up, the CEECs will be expected to harmonise their general aviation legislation, with the aim of incorporating the EU's 'third package' of liberalisation measures into national law, and come into line with EU standards on competition, safety and environmental protection. Negotiations over road passenger transport are under way, but the question of freight traffic is more problematic.

So far, the Commission only has mandates to negotiate transit agreements with Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.

While the CEECs want and need access to the EU's aviation and road freight markets, their primary requirement is for higher quality transport infrastructure - long neglected under their previous regimes.

Kinnock is placing the greatest emphasis on this issue. “Whatever timetable of enlargement of the Union emerges in reality, the present process of improving the infrastructure of Eastern and Central Europe must continue if these countries are to have any chance of catching up economically and if the west and east of Europe are to gain full mutual advantage from enlargement,” he has said.

At the Copenhagen summit in June 1993 and at Essen in December 1994, the Commission was asked by heads of state and government to extend the Trans-European Networks (TENs) projects into the CEECs as well as other countries seeking accession to the EU.

The association agreements envisage cooperation between the EU and the associated states on the development and modernisation of road, rail, port, air and inland waterways systems.

A series of projects have been financed - through the Group of 24 richest industrialised countries - in part by the EU's two technical assistance programmes, Phare and Tacis, as well as by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank.

In 1993-94, the creditor countries, the CEECs and the states of the former Soviet Union agreed that these projects needed to be given a 'hierarchy' so that scarce resources were not too thinly spread.

In the same way that the EU identified 14 top projects to benefit from preferential Union financing, a pan-European transport conference in Crete in 1994 named nine so-called 'priority corridors'. These include road and rail links from Helsinki to Warsaw and Gdansk via Riga and Talinn, from Berlin to Moscow via Warsaw and Minsk, and from Dresden to Istanbul via Thessaloniki.

To qualify for priority status, the projects needed to be ready for work to begin within five years, have a rate of return of 10&percent; and have a limited impact on the environment.

Responsibility for overall coordination of the projects lies with the Group of 24 transport committee, chaired by the Commission, while, for several of the corridors, memoranda of understanding have been drawn up between the CEECs and other countries in conjunction with the Commission.

The next stage of the process will be the publication of a Commission working paper on extending EU infrastructure into Eastern Europe, designed to provide the basis for discussions between the three Commissioners responsible for TENs - Kinnock, Energy Commissioner Christos Papoutsis and Industry Commissioner Martin Bangemann.

The views of representatives of the CEECs' transport ministries will be taken into account after they have been to Brussels on 7 May to launch a joint assessment of their infrastructural needs.

For both sides, the discussions are meant to climax at the next pan-European transport conference in Helsinki in June next year.