The challenge of building a democratic system

Date: 25/09/1997

By Mark Turner

DURING the enlargement negotiations in 1993, European Commission experts often grumbled at the candidates' relative ignorance of EU law and practice.

“Even with the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries, the Commission noted large vacuums in their understanding of Community law, especially its implementation,” said spokesman Nikolaus van der Pas.

However, if 1993 seemed complicated, 1998 could be a veritable Gordian knot - and one invulnerable to Macedonian steel at that.

Although administrators from central and eastern Europe have spent the last year (if not considerably longer) getting acquainted with Union legislation, the sheer amount of information they still have to absorb is staggering.

Given that the EU acquis and its implications bamboozled even the well-heeled experts of northern Europe, it is no surprise that their eastern counterparts are finding life tough.

Trained and educated in a system which denied the very premises of free market democracy, the civil services in the former Communist countries are still in something of a state of shock.

During the Nineties, CEEC administrators and judges have had to learn not only how to conform to up-to-date democratic practice, but to completely re-educate themselves in the most basic concepts of markets, regulation and enforcement.

It has not been easy. The economic collapse that followed independence from the Soviet Union almost everywhere left the new civil services underpaid, under-resourced and understaffed.

Furthermore, most of the brightest and youngest in the East, sick of the whole business of government and duty to the state, opted to work for well-paying private industry.

The burden on those left behind to build new legal and executive systems - in some cases (as in the Baltic states) starting completely from scratch - has been enormous.

The problem is that no matter how understandable their problems are, no EU candidates will be allowed to join until they prove they can understand, incorporate and (most importantly) implement the Union's vast corpus of law.

The Commission's Agenda 2000 makes the size of the task quite clear. In its second volume, The challenge of enlargement, it states: “... the applicant countries' institutional and administrative capacity to implement the acquis is a key problem in the enlargement preparations. They must be helped to set up institutions and administrations capable of establishing and effectively implementing Community legislation.”

According to the Commission's avis, national administrations in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Romania would all need “a major and sustained effort of reform” before they would be able to implement the EU acquis effectively.

Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia did better, but still need to continue with their reforms to be capable of implementing the acquis in the medium term.

It is clear that without a huge education and restructuring programme, most of the candidates will find it very difficult to join the EU by 2002/3 - the earliest feasible date for Union expansion.

Responding to this, the EU's Phare technical assistance programme, worth 1.2 billion ecu a year, will place administrative reform at the centre of its new programme due to begin next year. Over the next five years, the Commission hopes to train eastern specialists in essential fields from customs to the environment and statistics.

Question marks remain over exactly how that will be achieved. The Commission plans a kind of twinning system under which, for example, staff from the German court of auditors would help out their Hungarian counterparts, or French judges would train Poles.

This has led to fears that the system may be unworkable in practice, given the new austerity budgets in the West.

But before they complain about the costs, existing EU members should probably pause a while and ask themselves how important Union enlargement really is. If the answer is 'very', administrative training is an investment they cannot afford to scrimp on.