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| The EU: Love It Or Leave It |
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Unless the Irish say no this week, the European Union will embark on its biggest enlargement ever. Why are those poised to join having second thoughts?
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By J.F.O. McALLISTER |
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Posted Sunday, Oct.13, 2002; 16.04 BST
Tomas Jirsa, a confident, gum-chewing 19-year-old from Prague, is standing on Kildare Street in Dublin, handing out leaflets and wearing a bright red vest that proclaims: I'm from the Czech Republic and against nice — ask me why. Nice is shorthand for the European Union enlargement treaty the Irish government dearly wants voters to ratify this Saturday. (They already rejected it once, last year, thanks to a swirl of conflicting emotions: fear that it would undercut Irish neutrality and sovereignty; an urge to give a bloody nose to the government of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.) If the Irish vote yes this time, 10 new countries, including the Czech Republic, will join the E.U. in little more than a year — a momentous result that the European Commission last week proudly confirmed was still on track. But if they vote no, the treaty will collapse and the historic process of extending the Union to encompass countries once locked behind the Iron Curtain will be knocked sideways, if not into reverse.
So why is Jirsa rooting for the deal to die? "I'm totally pro-European!" he says. But he has read the fine print of the Nice Treaty and doesn't like the terms — this young man from a former communist country thinks they're undemocratic. "It changes the whole European scheme in favor of the big nations," he argues. Countries will lose their veto rights on some issues; a cozy club of longtime members will be permitted to cook up cooperation schemes that exclude newcomers; no longer will each nation be perpetually guaranteed a commissioner in Brussels. "The current arrangements are working well enough. I want to be part of Europe, but the old Europe," he insists, before walking down a quiet street (only a few people have bothered to ask him about Nice, as it turns out, and most of them are reporters). He boards an open-topped double-decker bus full of like-minded activists from Estonia, Finland, Denmark and Slovenia — a sign on the side calls it the speak-up-for-small-nations democracy tour. Until Saturday's vote, the tour will be zooming around Ireland — which happens to be the biggest net beneficiary of E.U. subsidies — trying to convince its voters to make the E.U. harder for other small nations to join.
Different place, same cold feet: it's evening in Skaradki, a tiny village near Lodz in the Polish heartland. The primary school gym is decked out with bunting and tables are groaning with homemade sausages and dumplings as about 450 people from all over Poland gathered for a farmers' congress toss back vodka at a rate their visitor cannot match. Danuta Hübner, the demure and determined Polish Minister for European Affairs, has been hitting the boards in places like Skaradki for months to persuade Poles to vote yes to joining the E.U. in the national referendum set for next year.
Amid the din, one of the delegates turns to her and speaks softly. "If we held an open vote in this room about joining the E.U., 100% would vote no," the man says. "But if you did a secret ballot, 90% would say yes." Why? In public, the farmers don't want to be seen capitulating to sinister forces from Brussels who are thought to be paving the way for a German conquest-by-checkbook. But privately, they have already calculated how much their E.U. subsidies will be worth.
Having renounced Karl Marx, the people of the east are finding that Europe is like the club described by Groucho: not quite so desirable now that it will take them as members. What began as a grand project to reunite the sundered halves of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is ending as a cold calculation of structural funds and subsidy levels. What used to be about blood and passion — binding wounds, seizing the historical moment, forging a common future — is now about getting paid and looking out for No. 1. Make a stirring speech about unifying the Continent for the first time since Charlemagne and you'll get hooted out of the public square; emphasize how membership can cut tariffs and boost the bottom line and you may have company — at least from people who run companies. The thrill is gone, replaced on both sides of the E.U. divide by the familiar grind of competing national, corporate and individual interests.
The mood isn't uniformly ugly. In each of the 10 candidate countries there are more people in favor of joining the E.U. than against it. In most, a large apathetic minority has no opinion. But the Speak-Up-for-Small-Nations Democracy Tour and Skaradki's ambivalent farmers are only two examples of disenchantment among those very people who not so long ago were clamoring to get in.
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