Must Try Harder

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From soup (ingredients therein) to nuts (tax thereon), prospective members of the European Union have for years been chewing through the estimated 80,000 pages of E.U. law and practice they have to adopt in order to make the club.

This week the European Commission sounds a starting shot bound to inject fresh urgency into that numbing work. The Commission’s annual reports on the readiness of membership candidates will deal a pat on the head to countries that have made what enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen calls "enormous efforts" to groom themselves for membership. But they will also apply what amounts to a firm kick in the pants to the 10 countries that have vowed to be ready to join by the end of 2002. Even for those furthest along in satisfying the 31 "chapters" to the negotiations, much work remains and little time to complete it. By this time next year, the familiar prospect of bleary-eyed all-night negotiating sessions, tense votes and secret armtwisting will be upon us as Western Europe makes good on its promise to obliterate the last vestiges of the Iron Curtain. It is a noble project, but hardly a pretty one.

This year’s report marks a particularly auspicious moment for Poland, which is either the linchpin or the spoiler in the E.U.’s ambitious Eastern enlargement — depending on whom you ask. With a population of 38.5 million, it is larger than the other nine most viable candidates together (Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia; candidates Romania and Bulgaria are not as far along, and formal negotiations have not begun with Turkey). "Any enlargement that includes Poland will be relatively large," says Verheugen, "and any without her will be small." He is counting on a big one, in time for the citizens of "up to 10" new member states to take part in European Parliament elections in 2004.

Under the parlous minority government headed by then-Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, which was turned out mercilessly at the polls on Sept. 23, Poland appeared to be off the pace set by other candidate countries over the last year. Incessant haggling over details — such as just when the Polish government will have to hike its tax on cigarettes — has soured public acceptance of the whole process.

Last week a poll by the opinion research center at Poland’s state television indicated that for the first time ever, fewer than half of Poles say they would vote in favor of membership in a referendum expected to take place in 2003. That’s still more than would vote against accession, but the trend is downward — and much tough negotiating still lies ahead. "We know and they know that it’s time to wake up," says a top E.U. official. "They have to demonstrate that what we’ve seen was a normal pre-election slowdown, and not a breakdown of Poland’s will to move the process forward."

The new government led by reformed communist Leszek Miller has promised to do just that. After meetings in Warsaw last week, Verheugen professed himself "very impressed by the determination and energy of the new [Polish] government." This week a special committee will start working out new negotiating positions that move away from what former Polish Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy calls the last government’s "fortress defense" posture, which he says allowed "a tone of rivalry with Brussels" to undermine negotiations. A tone of rivalry with Brussels is, of course, a rich European Union tradition, as de rigueur in Paris as it is in Poznan or Prague. Nobody likes being told what to do by an institution with at best tenuous democratic legitimacy.

The difference is that while the current member states tend toward haughty disdain for what is, after all, their own invention, the candidates nurse the injured pride of discrimination. In Poland, that familiar feeling is centered on E.U. neighbors Germany and Austria. Both countries fear an influx of Polish workers upon accession and are pressing for transition periods of up to seven years before Poles can profit fully from the "free movement of persons" that is a central tenet of the E.U.’s single market.

Further afield, E.U. members Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland have all pledged to open their labor markets immediately for new member countries, and Germany is willing to increase its quotas for Polish workers in some industries under a bilateral agreement. But such deals — of the sort Germany recently signed for information-technology employees from India — rankle the Poles. "We can’t allow our best skilled workers to be sucked out of Poland," says Polish diplomat Maciej Popowski. Poland currently has a 16% unemployment rate and faces even higher joblessness in the years ahead, while Germany’s demographics suggest that it could need more workers sooner rather than later.

"The question is how this problem can be solved so that it doesn’t look like a humiliation to the Polish public," says Verheugen, who points out that the Commission granted the Poles nine transition periods in its recently closed chapter on the environment. He stresses that phase-ins on a broad range of matters were a feature of previous enlargements — most recently for Austria, Sweden and Finland — and shouldn’t be seen as a badge of shame by the current candidates. "They have to get away from the idea that transitional periods somehow doom a member country to second-class status."

Poland’s tragic history among abrasive neighbors doomed it to exist as an idea rather than a nation for 178 of the last 210 years. That has left the land itself as a prime source of Polish identity, which is one reason why Polish negotiators have until now insisted on waiting 18 years before foreigners could purchase agricultural property. Though that period is bound to come down toward the E.U.’s proposal of seven years, negotiators suggest it won’t be as easy to finesse as the question of movement of workers.

Still ahead for all the candidates are daunting negotiations on agriculture, the support of which consumes almost half of the European Union’s $84 billion annual budget. Most of Poland’s 2 million farms don’t produce for the market and thus won’t qualify for price supports. Even so, the E.U. argues, granting aid to farmers in Central Europe along the rules applied to those in the current E.U. would break the bank. Commission officials in Brussels suggest that the Union should offer direct payment to farmers in new member countries beginning with their accession in 2004, but that at the outset they should be prorated to reflect the lower cost of living in the East. That position is likely to come under crossfire both from West European farmers eager to put off any sharing of the wealth and from Eastern negotiators who want the whole hog right from the start.

The prospect of strife over agriculture is particularly strong in Poland. The Polish Peasant Party is a member of the government coalition, and radical farm advocate Andrzej Lepper of the Samoobrona, or "self-defense," party stands ready to foment rebellion should the government be tempted to give away the farm. Yet Poland’s size and historical importance means that it is almost a political imperative to have the nation among the first group of entrants.

Despite assurances that each candidate country will be allowed in on its own merits alone, other potential entrants fear a so-called big bang scenario under which everyone else is doomed to wait for Poland. "I have heard many times the word solidarity coming from the mouths of various European officials, meaning waiting for everybody," says Jiri Havlik, director of the Czech Foreign Ministry’s E.U. coordination department. Counters Verheugen: "An old, deep-seated fear — and an unfounded one. The simple fact is that no candidate country can show you even the shadow of evidence that anything has slowed down because of Poland."

He insists that Poland isn’t really lagging much behind now, will catch up for good in the coming months and thus "clearly belongs in the top class of candidates." It will fall to the new government to prove in the year ahead that such trust is not misplaced