Negotiating the long and winding road between application and eventual welcome

Date: 29/04/04

When the ten new members formally join the EU on 1 May, there will be little thought among the revellers at parties across the expanded Union of the thousands of hours spent negotiating the terms under which the candidates will become full members.

ssible thanks to a four-year process trawling through 80,000 pages of EU legislation - and on the candidates' side, preparing tens of thousands of pages of their own to outline what they could offer.

After a formal launch under the UK presidency in March 1998, negotiations got properly under way with the

Austrians at the helm in October of that year.

In a slightly unrealistic atmosphere, talks on seven of the 28 chapters were opened and four were provisionally closed almost immediately. Everyone knew that science and technology, education and training, and policy on small businesses were not the major issues of this process.

In any case negotiations on Europe Agreements, which preceded the enlargement discussions proper, had dealt with a number of tricky issues by removing a range of duties on industrial goods. In doing so, they stimulated investment in the candidate countries which could then export their goods to the EU - and also triggered a process of liberalization and privatization in many countries.

Talks continued through 1999 and 2000 and saw the start of negotiations on some of the more sensitive areas, such as transport, energy, free movement of workers and justice and home affairs.

But no one was under any illusion that these questions would be resolved quickly. Although talks on energy started under the Finnish presidency in 1999, a row between Austria and the Czech Republic over the country's Temelin nuclear plant held up closure of this important chapter.

When Prague gave the go-ahead to a trial run for Temelin in October 2000, the country's borders were blocked by angry Austrian protestors for several days, considerably worsening relations between the two countries and creating a negative impression among Czechs which lingers today.

"This was a very sensitive issue in the Czech Republic and Austria which has contributed to a pessimistic mood among Czechs [about the EU]," comments one official.

Finally the issue was settled through the intervention of the European Commission, which drew up a report on nuclear safety and enlargement - although nuclear safety standards are not a part of EU legislation. Enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen, Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and Czech premier Milo Zeman agreed on the so-called Melk process and, the air cleared, a way was finally open to close the energy chapter at the end of 2001.

The Swedish presidency in the first half of 2001 saw the first major breakthrough in the negotiations. Slovenia was able to close its environment chapter, which had promised to be one of the most problematic because of the difficulties of reaching the EU's high standards in areas such as water and air quality, and waste management.

The difficulty presented by this dossier was illustrated by the fact that it was the area with the highest number of requests for transition periods submitted by the candidates. Latvia alone had 23. Many of these were accepted because of the recognition that these countries needed to invest billions of euro over many years to bring their infrastructure up to scratch.

Many identify the Swedish presidency as key in keeping the negotiations moving and ensuring that the whole process could be wrapped up by 2002, in time for the candidates to enter before the next round of European Parliament elections, in June.

"There was a big breakthrough in the Swedish presidency. They had very clear ideas about where they wanted to go," commented one official closely involved in the negotiations. Sweden's big success was getting a deal on one of the thorniest of dossiers - the question of free movement of workers after enlargement. But Stockholm was helped enormously by the fact that just as the Commission was drafting its offer to the candidates, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder waded in, saying that he wanted a seven year ban on the new countries' citizens coming to work in the EU. Following a tough debate in March 2001 in the Commission, with social affairs chief Anna Diamantopoulou arguing for only four years and Verheugen backing Berlin's line, they finally settled on the "5 + 2" formula. (The transition period should come to an end after five years, but may be prolonged for a further three years.) This was presented to the candidates at the beginning of June.

Already in June, Hungary became the first country to accept the offer, having cleverly negotiated a few concessions of its own, namely the right to impose similar restrictions on citizens wanting to work in Hungary. The other countries gradually fell into line with the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Poland holding out until the second half of the year. Estonia finally settled in March 2002.

There was a sense of anti-climax that what was predicted to be the most difficult chapter could be closed almost a year before the target date of the end of negotiations. Nevertheless, this deal has left lingering resentments which have been stirred up again when all member states except Ireland recently announced that they would be imposing restrictions on workers from the acceding countries.

Naturally, although the candidate countries had little choice but to accept what was on offer, it went down very badly back home. "This had a big psychological effect," said one diplomat from a new member state. "It has affected support for the Union in the polls."

While the other major battles were predictable, there were several issues which stirred up public opinion without making the news in the EU-15. One was the question of how to tax home distillers. Making your own spirits at home has a long tradition in many of the candidate countries, especially in the former parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But the EU demanded a wholesale change in how these products were taxed which met with strong resistance from the candidates, especially Hungary which argued that its existing methods of control were effective. For Hungary, the issue was only resolved at the very end of negotiations at the summit in Copenhagen, in December 2002.

Another tricky subject was the free movement of capital which determined whether EU citizens could buy farmland and holiday homes in the new member states. Fearful of a new colonization by wealthy German and Austrian landowners or tourists, the candidates held out for transition periods until the market could be fully opened. Most candidates settled quickly in the first half of 2001, with five years for secondary residences and seven for farm and forestry land. But Poland, where the issue was acutely sensitive, held out until the Barcelona summit in March 2002 when premier Leszek Miller got agreement on an 18-year restriction on farmland.

The major battles over the biggest challenges of the negotiations, the "money chapters" such as agriculture, structural funds and budget contributions, are well known. Poland's last-minute hold-out for extra cash at the Copenhagen summit has revealed what a hard bargainer Warsaw will be as a new member of the Union - Miller's demands even delayed Denmark's set-piece ceremony to celebrate the closing of the negotiations and kept Queen Margrethe waiting.

Yet diplomats comment that the negotiating sessions themselves were highly civilized, almost artificially formal affairs, often lasting no more than three-quarters of an hour because all the hard work had been done in working groups and meetings between the Commission and the candidates beforehand.

Where there was tension and disagreement was among the 15 member states. In their book about the negotiations, EU Erweiterung (Verlag Österreich 2003), Austrian diplomats Michael Schwarzinger and Martin Sajdik recount a clash between the then French and Greek foreign ministers, Hubert Vedrine and Theodoros Panagalos, over Cyprus, which saw the Greek storm out of the room only to be tracked down and brought back by the Austrian foreign minister.

There were also short tempers at a key General Affairs Council meeting in June 2002. Ministers of the four member states who were opposed to paying direct aid to the new members' farmers went head-to-head with newly-appointed French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin and his key ally Germany's Joschka Fischer, attempting to delay discussions of direct aid until after the Commission had unveiled its plans for the mid-term review of the Common Agricultural Policy.

Looking back on the overall negotiations, there are mixed views about the outcome. Some diplomats express surprise that the EU was able to deliver by the dates it set itself and keep to its "Big Bang" enlargement plan. Others take the line that the final deal was done on the cheap, even if there was a last-minute increase in funds at Copenhagen. "What you get is less than the acquis. Think about a farmer on the border who only gets 25% of what his EU counterpart gets. It's even less than the Berlin deal [on accession-related expenditure]."

One optimistically predicted that the EU might be more generous in future when countries such as Croatia become members. But with the forthcoming arguments about the EU's next seven years' budget shaping up to be particularly bruising, there are little grounds for optimism.

Article is part of a European Voice Special Report on EU Enlargement.