The Times (UK)

Eastern Europe disenchanted with dithering, dictatorial EU
BY ROGER BOYES IN WARSAW

NO AMOUNT of window dressing at the European Union summit in Gothenburg this week can mask the fact that European expansion, the great glittering project of the decade, is in danger.

The Irish rejection of Nice — “a cold shower” was the headline in the Warsaw newspaper Zycie — has stunned the East, which understands only now the depths of Western indifference and even hostility to enlargement. “The demons of public opinion have been set free,” Jacek Pawlicki, one of Poland’s shrewdest observers of the European Union, said.

Central Europeans know that if the Germans, Americans or French hold an Irish-style referendum, the result will go against enlargement. Expanding the EU is a vote loser in the West and demands a show of reluctance from the political class.

As a result the West is hopelessly mismanaging negotiations. The East, faced with unreasonable demands, is in turn losing its enthusiasm.

The constant fiddling with the calendar is symptomatic. In 1990 Poland was promised membership by 1995. Then Helmut Kohl said it would get it by 2000. The EU is speeding closer but is always five years away, like the Aesopian hare.

There are at least three critical failures in the negotiating process. First, it is making poor countries poorer. Lithuania, for example, is under pressure to close its nuclear reactor at Ignalina, though its safety record is not bad compared even with West German power stations. Now Lithuania faces a ruinous dependency on imported energy, probably from Russia.

Many Estonians are confused: they will have to cede hard-won political powers to Brussels and be forced closer to Russia. It is hardly surprising that support for membership has dropped to about 49 per cent from more than 60 per cent a few years ago.

Across the East, regions offering competitive tax rates will have to conform to EU standards. Books and food will have to be taxed. East Europeans are being told to accept a seven-year transition in which the fundamental EU freedom of labour provision will not apply. The spectre of millions of Slavs entering Germany and Austria to take jobs from honest natives plays into the hands of the right-wing populist Jörg Haider or Chancellor Schröder’s likely election rival, Edmund Stoiber.

The Poles in particular — because of their large population, relatively high unemployment and proximity to Germany — are to be kept at arm’s length. Yet simple observation suggests that Poles are not poised for an invasion; those who come at the moment (including some 100,000 seasonal workers to pick German asparagus and strawberries) are needed desperately. All this makes a nonsense of the grand ambition to stretch Western prosperity to the frontiers of Russia. It was, after all, Germany that wanted enlargement most, to consolidate old markets and to ensure that it would no longer be the Eastern fringe of the Union. Now as Germany quibbles, Spain, Italy, Greece and others who would lose entitlements from Brussels queue to voice their objections.

The second danger is that the fantasy that all candidates are in some way equal — “meet our standards and you can join” — is about to collapse. The Continent will soon be divided between club members and no-hopers, adding to insecurity. Poland will be required, under the Schengen agreement, to close its frontier with Ukraine, making it harder to keep Kiev from a proRussian path.

Hungary inside the EU, neighbouring Romania outside, will revive problems that have been dormant for a decade. There are two million Hungarians living in Romania, 600,000 in Slovakia, 200,000 in Ukraine: under the current visa-free regime ethnic Hungarians have been able to keep their sense of identity without posing a threat to national governments. When Hungary is inside the EU these borders will be closed, the minorities cut off.

Lithuania inside the EU, Russia permanently outside, changes the politics of the Eastern Baltics. Brussels is only now acknowledging that access to Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave, is a problem.

Eastward enlargement was supposed to be a moral gesture, a fusion of two parts of Europe that belonged together — “the two lungs of the Continent” in the words of Pope John Paul. Instead the timing is being dictated by Western election schedules, the third failure of the talks. Agriculture, a huge area of dispute, will be tackled only after French elections next year.

Labour mobility, land ownership and the environment may well have to wait for the German elections in September 2002. The EU is placing a crippling price on the candidates. Some 68 per cent of Poles now believe the country should delay entry rather than surrender important positions. Czechs are beginning to think aloud about what would happen if enlargement failed.

Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, said: “There is such a thing as life outside the European Union.”The threat to embarrass the EU by sabotaging its big project is about the only bullet in Eastern revolvers. But the fact is that Brussels’s demands are shaped by an ideal image of a standardised, self-regulating

Continent which ignores the realities of the raw dynamic capitalism of the East. If the EU wants to be the institutional voice of the whole Continent then it has to acknowledge the complexities and frailties of the East — and to accept that it can learn a lesson or two from these culturally sophisticated, free-thinking and self-assertive societies. The more Brussels piles on the pressure, the more it resembles Leonid Brezhnev’s Moscow.

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2001