New EU heads of state need to learn old negotiating skills

By Simon Coss

Date: 29/04/04

If there's one thing nearly all of the erudite members of central and eastern Europe's multitude of think-tanks agree on it is this: now is not the time for complacency.

While the new member states should rightly congratulate themselves for achieving the often impossible-seeming goal of EU membership, they still have an awful lot of hard work ahead of them.

The new Union countries must now make the transition from applicants knocking at the door of the EU club, to fully fledged and active members. And they must do it as soon as possible.

Part of this process will involve learning to play the EU negotiating game with the same level of suave, slippery skill as the smoothest talking diplomats from "old" member states, such as France, Germany, the UK, or Spain.

Poland in particular has lessons to learn on this score, argues the Warsaw-based Centre for International Relations (CIR).

One of the reasons the December 2003 EU summit in Brussels ended in what appeared to be such a shambles was because Warsaw allowed itself to be negotiated into a corner by old EU hands Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder.

In an extensive paper called Between Nice and Brussels, or Life after Death, CIR expert Jerzy Kranz argues that the French president and German chancellor deliberately set out to humiliate Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller by refusing to offer him a face-saving way out of his intransigent stance over voting rights in the Council of Ministers.

"In effect, the government allowed itself to be drawn into a trap," argues Kranz.

A more seasoned EU member state could perhaps have negotiated its way out of the Brussels impasse, instead of being forced into a corner and then presented to the Union's media as a stubborn, anti-European ingrate.

Miller should have seen Paris and Berlin coming and arrived in Brussels armed with a face-saving climb down from his stance over the voting rights agreed at the 1999 Nice summit.

"The Nice voting system is not worth defending "to the last", while the double majority formula does not pose a threat that should be fought against, whatever the price," argues Kranz, referring to the principle that EU laws should be adopted by a majority of Union countries representing a majority of citizens.

If Poland is to make a success of its new role as an EU member state it must do much more to identify and head off future clashes, such as the Brussels fiasco, before they happen, says the CIR researcher.

"These problems will not disappear overnight, but the art of politics is about preventing them if possible - and, if not, it is about learning how to respond to them," he adds.

What is true for Poland is equally valid for many of the other new states, if their national think-tanks are to be believed.

In the case of the former Soviet bloc states in particular, these are countries in which the idea of forging a strong national identity has been central to the process of breaking psychological ties with their communist past.

Now, however, these countries will have to learn how to move away from nationalist rhetoric and "speak European" - at least when they are in Brussels. According to the Prague-based "Europeum" think-tank, this is likely to prove particularly tricky in the Czech Republic, where Euroscepticism is now running particularly high.

"The debate in the lower house on the government's mandate for the intergovernmental conference was marked with populism and expressions such as 'We will not allow any German to rule us from Brussels'," explains David Král in a recent Europeum paper.

Král says this means Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla will have his work cut out if he is to convince other EU countries that his people are "good Europeans, committed to further deepening of integration".

But the task is by no means insurmountable. Spidla and politicians from the other new member countries just need to develop the skill that most seasoned EU ministers have of holding two diametrically opposite views at the same time - one for domestic consumption and one for Brussels.

Then they will know that they have really arrived.

Article is part of a European Voice Special Report on EU Enlargement and argues that new Member States must become active members of the EU as soon as possible and learn to play the 'negotiating game' with diplomats from 'old' Member States such as France, Germany and the UK.

http://www.csm.org.pl/en/files/rap_i_an_0304a.pdf http://www.csm.org.pl/en/files/rap_i_an_0304a.pdf

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