Vienna polishes up its performance for the presidency

Date: 18/06/1998

When it assumes responsibility for EU business next month, Austria will be the first of the Union's three newest members to do so. Yet, so far, it has adopted a low profile in Union affairs. Thomas Klau examines the internal and external factors which will influence Vienna's term at the helm

IN THE last few months, the former stables of Schloss Laudon on the outskirts of Vienna have played host to a succession of strange weekend charades.

Senior diplomats and ministry officials congregated in the idyllic château, now the seat of Austria's civil service academy, to re-enact EU Council of Ministers and working group meetings, playing the parts of European Commission, presidency and member state representatives.

To achieve maximum realism, some of the sessions, organised at the behest of the Austrian government by an American management expert, even included a staging of the working lunches and coffee breaks which form such a pivotal part of Council diplomacy.

More than any official statement, this bizarre exercise has clearly demonstrated the iron determination of EU newcomer Austria to leave behind a positive memory of its first-ever stint in charge of Union business.

The Laudon seminars also reveal a fear in Viennese government circles that without proper training, many of the country's top mandarins might be unequal to the task of taking up the Union's day-to-day management.

Vienna's civil service has yet to come to terms with the workings of an EU machinery from which, since the country's entry into the Union in 1995, more than two-thirds of all new legislation has originated.

Austria has been the slowest of the three countries which joined the Union two years ago to establish a clear profile in EU affairs.

While Finnish officials and politicians surprised and delighted their partners with their swift and competent embrace of Union politics and priorities, and while Sweden soon signed up as a member of the EU's awkward squad, Austria's contribution to the European debate was notable mostly for its absence.

With rare exceptions, Austrian ministers have left little imprint on Council meetings, while Viennese officials posted to Brussels can be heard to complain about the cumbersome decision-making process at home which often leaves them without guidance on which position to defend.

Austria's political culture, which cultivates consensus more than any other EU country, has denied the Viennese leadership the strength of swift decision-making which usually gives small countries a strategic advantage over their bigger partners in Union affairs.

While political instructions from Vienna to Austrian officials in Brussels are often slow to come through, the long-established tradition of Parteienproporz - the sharing out of political spoils among the two big parties - has also hampered Vienna's ability to place its officials in key EU posts, according to Austrian observers.

Yet taken in conjunction with the federal, Länder-based structure Austria shares with its German neighbour, the post-war tradition of cross-party consensus and cooperation, which extends to the relations between employers and workers, has also given the country an almost unparalleled degree of political and economic stability.

Austria's excellent employment performance, with an unemployment rate hovering just above 4% of the workforce, serves as a fascinating reminder that in some countries at least, a more corporatist, consensus-based approach to economic and social management seems able to deliver as good employment results as a more liberal, 'Anglo-Saxon' style of capitalism.

Since its accession to the EU, the Vienna government has been curiously shy about trumpeting the merits of the 'Austrian model', the success of which, in employment terms, seems to fly in the face of much of the wisdom now prevailing in the economic debate.

Austria's reluctance to put itself forward as a role model may well be another symptom of the deep insecurity which has been a crucial part of the country's national consciousness since the end of the last century.

The last decades of the Austrian empire saw a crumbling of the country's imperial certainties, and the dramatically sudden loss of great-power status in 1918 threw it into an ongoing and still unresolved search for a new role in Europe.

That search, as the internal debate over its forthcoming EU presidency has shown, continues to put its imprint on Austrian politics today.

INITIALLY, some members of the grand coalition government between the Socialists in the Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ) and the conservatives in the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP) touted the sixth-month EU presidency as Austria's first return to the global political stage since the days of empire.

Parallels were drawn between this December's summit of Union leaders in Vienna and the famous Vienna Congress of 1815, where Europe was partitioned after the downfall of Napoleon.

Yet this heady mood of self-importance has increasingly given way to a more sober appraisal, better attuned to the realities of Union politics in the second half of this year.

Austria's Socialist Chancellor Viktor Klima and its ÖVP Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schüssel now like to stress that the presidency's role is essentially that of an honest broker, with progress depending less on the presidency itself than on the willingness of its partners to engage in consensus-building.

Politicians in Vienna have woken up to the fact that for much of Austria's presidency, EU politics are likely to be hijacked and largely paralysed by the German elections.

Even under the most favourable of circumstances, a new government in Bonn is unlikely to emerge as an effective participant in EU affairs until four weeks after the elections on 27 September.

This will leave Austria with barely a month and a half before the December summit in Vienna, which is to be devoted mainly to the Union's Agenda 2000 programme of reforms to prepare for enlargement eastwards.

With the discussion about the restructuring of the EU's spending and revenue-raising certain to be overshadowed by a lack of constructive contributions from the Union's biggest financial contributor, Austria may well have to turn to other subjects to achieve meaningful advances in the EU policy debate.

Yet on the one subject where Vienna might be expected to take on a natural leadership role - the EU's expansion into central and eastern Europe - the Austrian coalition has shown itself to be increasingly hamstrung by growing popular fears about the impact of enlargement on the country's economy and jobs.

As Schüssel pointed out in an interview last month, Austria is surrounded by a population of several million Hungarians, Czechs, Slovakians and Slovenians who, if the frontiers were open, might choose to seek work in Austria while continuing to live in their country.

This direct exposure to competition from the poorer half of Europe means that Austria, rather than pushing for the swift integration of its former dominions into the EU, is increasingly lobbying its partners in Brussels to agree to long transitional periods before admitting the eastern countries to full Union membership.

There is one key development facing the EU this year which the Austrian government hopes will make as few waves as possible before 1 January 1999.

With virtually all the essential issues settled on the plunge into economic and monetary union, big EMU headlines between now and December could only mean that plans for the currency merger had hit an unexpected and dangerous last-minute hitch.

When it comes to the EU's most important internal reform project ever, the government in Vienna devoutly hopes for an exceedingly boring presidency.

Austria takes up the EU Presidency for the period July-December 1998.