Could and should do better

Date: 22/11/03

Poland should be smart as well as tough

POLAND is the big cheese of central Europe, accounting for roughly half its population and half its GDP. This enlargement is at least half about Poland too. An enlargement without it would scarcely have been worth the effort, or so thought Germany, Poland's champion when negotiations began five years ago.

Some of the warmth has since gone out of Polish-German relations, for reasons that puzzle the Poles. It has something to do with the spat over Iraq, more to do with a rethink on Germany's part about the EU and its uses. Helmut Kohl, Germany's chancellor until 1998, did put a European interest first, much of the time. His successor, Gerhard Schröder, is less inclined to shape Germany's EU policy by reference to its warmongering in the previous century. Mr Schröder's Germany is starting to behave more as the EU's other big countries do, putting the national interest first while proclaiming the European one.

Germany has come to see enlargement more in terms of the headaches it will bring. It will make new demands on the EU budget, and by extension on Germany, the main payer into the budget. It will bring millions of low-wage workers into the EU, half of them Poles, who can price German workers out of jobs even more easily than before. And it will mean more tedious negotiations, more governments to square and more ministers to persuade whenever Germany wants to have its way on a policy question.

With Germany less inclined to give a helping hand, Poland will have to work all the harder for what it gets within the EU. It will need to perfect two things, each of which it has only part-formed as yet. The first is a clear idea of the strategic aims it wants to pursue in Europe over time; the second is the battery of skills and resources to advance those aims in Brussels.

The skills and resources question is one where Poland ought to have an advantage over the other accession countries, at least in quantity. As the biggest of them, it can afford to support the biggest civil service, and so to engage across the whole dizzying range of issues discussed in the councils and committee rooms of Brussels.

But current perceptions of Polish performance, at least from the Brussels end, are not uniformly encouraging. European Commission officials, speaking anonymously, describe Polish officials as “difficult to learn to deal with”...”extremely stubborn”...”very aggressive on their national interests”...”the ones who will argue the most”, according to a report by a lobbying company, Burson Marsteller.

Commission officials cannot be left the last word here. It is, after all, the job of national representatives to defend national interests, which can mean being stubborn and aggressive at times. But the trick in EU negotiating is to secure the maximum return for your stubbornness and aggression, which means making other people feel that you are deploying those qualities sparingly and constructively. Even the most notorious blusterers among current EU members, the Spaniards, try not to bring too many negotiations down around their ears. At the last minute they will trade away their opposition on the issue in hand against a handsome concession elsewhere, and they are respected for doing so. Poland needs to be viewed that way if it wants to play tough and still win.

But play tough for what? So far, Poland's politicians have been offering voters a worryingly short-term view of EU membership, talking as though the success or failure of it should be measured by the net quantities of quick cash Poland can get from the EU budget in farming subsidies and regional development funds.

This approach is bad. EU farm subsidies do nobody any lasting good. The same may be true of regional development funds, though the evidence here is more ambivalent. Poland may well not get the money it wants. Other countries will be fighting just as hard for shares. And bidding successfully for EU development funds, even those earmarked for a given country, requires skills in project-planning and monitoring which Poland has been slow to develop.

Poland will need to lift its nose from the small print of the budget if it is to shape EU thinking on another issue close to its heart: relations between the enlarged EU and the countries on its eastern flank, including Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus. Current EU thinking holds that these countries can be placed in the same general framework as countries in North Africa and the Middle East. They will be allowed degrees of access to the EU's “single market”, but they will not be viewed as candidates for EU membership, at least in the foreseeable future. Poland would prefer a special policy for the eastern European countries, which includes the possibility of membership.

Last year Ukrainians crossed the border with Poland 6m times, Belarussians 4m times. Most were small traders buying goods for resale at home, and giving a boost as they did so to the economy of eastern Poland, the poorest part of the country. Others were working cheaply in Poland as cleaners and building workers.

In October, as a step towards imposing full EU border controls and visa rules, Poland began demanding visas from its neighbours. These were given free to Ukrainians, and cost just €10 ($11) for Russians and Belarussians, but the effect was dramatic. Crossings at Polish border-points fell by more than two-thirds. The numbers may rise as more Ukrainians and others get multiple-entry visas for Poland, but the border is making its presence felt.

Poland wants Ukraine as a prosperous, stable and accessible neighbour, not as a poor and rackety one with a dodgy democracy and even dodgier nuclear power stations. It worries that the more Ukraine is shut off from the European Union, the more it will fall behind, economically and politically. Lithuania feels the same way about Belarus (though without wanting to do any favours for its oppressive leader, Alexander Lukashenka); Romania worries similarly about Moldova.

Finding an accommodation here will be difficult. The fate of these eastern European countries will not be determined by the European Union, that much is clear. Nor, however, is it likely to be determined by these countries' governments alone. It will be determined partly by Russia, their other great neighbour, which ruled them through the Soviet Union until 1991 and is still involved intimately in their domestic politics and their national economies.

Russia wants them as its proteges. It talks of forming a “single economic zone” with Ukraine and Belarus, and with Kazakhstan too. It is not clear what this might mean in practice, save that Russia is exploring yet again ways to strengthen its regional influence. The extension of American power into the Middle East and Central Asia, and the extension of the EU across Europe, may well be leading Russia to think that the age of empires has returned, and that it should mark more clearly its own sphere.

The EU can have, at most, some influence in eastern Europe, and Poland is right to want a big part in deciding how that influence can be used best. It is the great new frontier country between east and west. It knows Russia well (too well, some Poles would say). It is to be part of the Union. It is a trusted ally of America. It can be of service to everyone. But first it must be taken seriously within the EU. It must prove itself a strong and far-sighted country, not merely a big or a stubborn one. It must champion policies to make all of Europe prosper, and worry less about wheezes for putting cash into its own farmers' pockets. It must raise its game.

Poland should be smart as well as tough. Article is part of a survey 'When east meets west: a survey of EU enlargement'.