Central Europe and the European Union: Toughening up

Date: 20/09/03

Central Europeans begin to sharpen their elbows for Brussels

WHEN President Jacques Chirac told a clutch of central European countries in February that they should have “shut up” instead of backing America in its confrontation with Iraq, his words cut deep. Most of the countries he insulted, including Poland and Hungary, had just been invited to join the European Union in 2004. They were minded to slip in quietly and behave politely to the club's older members while they learnt how the place worked. Mr Chirac changed their minds. If the older members were going to act that way, the new ones would act tough too.

They did just that in Italy earlier this month when EU foreign ministers (including those from the ten countries joining next year) discussed the Union's new draft constitution. The six founders - Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands - said the draft should be adopted, more or less as it stood, by the end of the year. Other EU members, including Ireland, Finland and Austria, were mildly unhappy. But the toughest criticism came from Poland, not even a member yet, with the other central Europeans close behind. “Nobody can limit our right to defend our position,” said Poland's foreign minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.

The new members, and some smaller countries already inside the EU, think that the draft constitution favours the Union's biggest countries, mainly France and Germany. To correct that, they want every country, however small, to go on nominating a full voting member to the European Commission, the EU's executive body, even when the EU has 25 members and more. They reject the draft constitution's proposal to cap the number of voting commissioners at 15, plus ten non-voting ones.

Poland, backed by Spain, also wants to block proposed changes to voting procedures in the EU's Council of Ministers, where governments decide on new laws. It wants to keep the existing system of weighted voting which favours small and medium-sized countries, so that Poland will have almost as many votes as Germany, though only half the population. The draft constitution proposes a simpler system whereby a simple majority of countries can carry a vote if they account for at least 60% of the EU's population.

Worryingly for the central Europeans, this rift over the constitution pits them against Germany, their biggest trading partner and their ally in the past, which wants the draft constitution adopted intact. Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, has reportedly fingered “a number of financially weak accession countries” as the constitution's main critics - a hint that Germany could use its financial muscle to get the sort of EU it wants.

But a more combative atmosphere in the EU may yet be a good thing if it leads the new members to toughen themselves up, economically and politically. How to do those things was one main theme of the recent annual Polish Economic Forum in the ski-town of Krynica.

The talk there showed that central Europeans have more confidence in their economic competitiveness than in their political readiness. Though poor, they reckon they have more flexible economies and more growth potential than their neighbours to the west. They are keen to adopt the euro, the EU's common currency, though they see that they may have to wait a while yet. The Poles, Hungarians and Czechs are running budget deficits that will have to be cut by half or more to meet euro-zone rules. That will be politically hard, especially if the zone's biggest countries (eg, France and Germany) run excessive deficits without being penalised.

The best advice on political readiness heard at Krynica came from Alan Mayhew, a British academic. Governments operating in Brussels should base their tactics on consistency and reliability, he said. Ministers and bureaucrats should speak with one voice, national positions should be clearly stated, and bargains struck with other countries should be kept. That may sound obvious, but it will be a big challenge for the shifting coalition governments common in central Europe. Another vital tactic, said Mr Mayhew, was to keep some flexibility in reserve - to have a Plan B ready for when Plan A gave way beneath you. Spain, he said, would already know what it was going to demand in exchange, if and when it had to yield on the constitution. Poland should be thinking fast, he implied, if it hadn't already done the same.

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