Citizens’ champion takes Union helm

Date: 14/12/00

By Tim Jones

SWEDEN'S presidency of the EU promises a new departure for the 1995 intake of Union members.

Where the Swedes' local rivals, the Finns, 'sold' their little-known country to peripatetic functionaries and the Austrians lavished cocktails, street parties, fireworks displays and even gifts on ungrateful media hounds, Stockholm promises something far more Lutheran.

Headlining Prime Minister Göran Persson's presidency programme is a pledge to create a Union "characterised by cost efficiency and budget restrictiveness" and "mainstreaming the gender equality perspective".

Not very inspiring. Still, waste, inefficiency and fraud in the EU play even worse in the Swedish media than they do in other northern European countries, and the Stockholm parliament boasts the highest number of women members in the world.

When Persson first assumed the Social Democratic Party leadership, his supporters fended off a challenge from the anointed Mona Sahlin on the basis that she had bought nappies and chocolates with a government credit card. This was a drop in the ocean compared with recent allegations against former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Jacques Chirac but, in the court of Swedish opinion, public-sector probity cannot be too squeaky clean.

Admirable this may be, but it is precisely this kind of stern attitude which has wound up some of Sweden's partners since the country joined five years ago. "They can have a very fundamentalist attitude to things and, unlike the Danes, the Finns or the Dutch, they will talk about these attitudes at length and people often feel lectured at," says a diplomat who did not wish to be named.

Officials from several member states cite Sweden's long-running campaign to extend its ban on advertising aimed at under-12s to the rest of the Union, even though it stands no chance of adoption, as well as its relentless focus on high-spending Union officials and lack of transparency in decision-making as prime examples of its high irritation factor.

But the Swedes remain on the side of the angels when it comes to pushing a rapid EU enlargement, opening Union markets to the world's poorest nations, promoting high environmental standards and extending recent overhauls of the "working methods and administrative culture" of the European Commission and the Council of Ministers into the European Parliament.

The Swedes have also contributed more than any other political culture to the increasing openness of the EU's institutions over the past half-decade. Governmental transparency and press rights are written into Swedish law and have been imported, in part at least, into Union practices - much to the chagrin of traditionally secretive political classes, especially in the UK and France.

For Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, this is just part of an overall approach towards EU citizens which needs to be stressed or the whole integrationist project will be jeopardised. "There is a need to deepen and improve the EU but we must do so in a more constructive dialogue with citizens, taking into account real needs," she said in a recent keynote speech introducing her country's presidency.

What this means in practical terms is yet to be explained but some member states fear that, in the words of one senior diplomat, Stockholm is advocating "presidency by focus group". He adds: "A phrase like that either means nothing at all or it means talking about policies that appeal to people on paper but mean very little in terms of practical delivery."

Sweden's interlocutors believe that citizen-friendly initiatives will mean a repeat performance of the first half of the

1998 German presidency, when new and enthusiastic Green and Socialist ministers promoted fuel taxes and a 'jobs pact' which petered out as concrete problems emerged.

The Swedish presidency's big issue, what leaders have dubbed their "greatest challenge", will be kicking off negotiations in some of the toughest policy areas with the Union's 12 candidate countries. Lars Danielsson, state secretary for EU affairs in Persson's office, says the presidency will be seeking a "critical breakthrough" next year in the toughest policy areas with the six front-runners: Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus.

This means producing tangible results on agriculture, the environment, free movement of people and budgetary contributions, plus a 'work programme' for the following two years of negotiations including a "time element" for all stages of the process. Target dates would be set for opening negotiations on all 31 chapters of the acquis communautaire with the second-wave countries: Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria and Malta.

Further east, the Swedes will follow the lead of the Finns in attempting to bind Russia into the new 'security architecture' emerging in Europe. Officials say that as a NATO outsider, Sweden will champion the Union's new rapid reaction force. But together with fellow neutral Ireland and NATO stalwart the UK, Lindh and Defence Minister Björn von Sydow will seek to stymie any French attempts to make the force "too easy" to activate.

Part of Sweden's "close-to-its-citizens" agenda will be a focus on improving the environment and sustainable development. The first priority will be helping to salvage a deal on climate change after last month's collapse of The Hague conference over huge differences between the US and EU positions.

More fundamentally, the incoming presidency wants to "continue the work of integrating environmental considerations into different EU policy areas" - an issue which it intends to make central to the June 2001 Göteborg summit. This will be the first time that a presidency has turned its set-piece summit into an environmental conference.

Environment Minister Svend Auken will concentrate on a "renewal" of the Union's policy towards the proliferation of new marketed chemicals, pushing an 'ecocycle' approach to imposing environmental requirements on the entire life cycle of goods and products, and putting together an "alcohol strategy" alongside campaigns against tobacco.

Another highly Swedish thrust to policy will be "gender equality" - something the Swedes stuck onto the Amsterdam Treaty and have been disappointed ever since that it never got the attention they felt it deserved. That will change under the new presidency, as Stockholm seeks to place sex equality at the heart of all employment policy and calls a special ministerial strategy meeting on the issue at the end of January.

Despite his best-laid plans, Persson may find himself at the mercy of events in the UK, as have many presidencies before. It is widely thought that Prime Minister Tony Blair will call an election in April, with a promise to hold a referendum on whether the country should join the euro zone soon afterwards.

Persson has managed to put off the internal single currency debate since winning support for his 'entry in principle' position at a party congress earlier this year. But a UK referendum might well accelerate his plans and give him parliamentary headaches from the left and right antis.

In the short term, it would also make Blair paranoid about agreeing any issues which could conceivably be misrepresented in the UK popular press as 'surrendering' sovereignty to Brussels. "That could make life very, very difficult," said a London official, recalling the heady days of the UK policy-making boycott when the EU declined to lift a ban on British beef exports.

Major feature, part of a survey on the Swedish EU Presidency.