Now that ten new members have joined the European Union
in what has become known as its Big Bang enlargement on May 1,
Brussels intends to pause for breath. The European Union has by
no means given up plans for further expansion, especially into the
Balkans, but enlargement will henceforth be a piecemeal process,
spread over a number of years, as each candidate country progressively
meets the terms of entry.
First in line are Bulgaria and Romania, which started membership
negotiations in 2000 but were not considered ready to join
the Union alongside the eight other Central and Eastern European
countries that participated in the Big Bang. Nevertheless, when those eight countries,
together with Cyprus and Malta, agreed on their entry terms in Copenhagen in 2002,
EU leaders reassured Bulgaria and Romania that they were part of the same admission
process. Their earliest date for membership, however, is January 1, 2007.
Both countries are keen to stick to
the timetable, but they are out of step.
While Bulgaria looks well placed to complete
its entry negotiations this summer,
serious questions have been raised over
whether Romania is ready. In early 2004,
the European Parliament warned Romania
that it was unlikely to join in 2007
unless it did more to fight corruption,
strengthen the independence of the judiciary
and pursue economic and administrative
reforms. Some members of the
Parliament even suggested suspending
negotiations with Romania.
The warning seems to have been
heard in Bucharest, not least because any
delay in the country's progress toward
EU membership would have dealt a humiliating
blow to the center-left government
ahead of local elections in June
and parliamentary and presidential polls
in November. The justice minister, long
seen as blocking reforms, was eventually
fired, prompting Guenter Verheugen, the
European Commissioner for Enlargement,
to reassure Romania that EU accession
in 2007 remained realistic.
Romania and Bulgaria, Mr. Verheugen
said, should neither be de-coupled, nor
made to wait for the next Big Bang, because
there would not be another one.
Behind closed doors, however, the
Commission is preparing a "reinforced
monitoring" system that could delay the
accession of Romania or Bulgaria for a
year or more if they do not keep the
promises made during membership negotiations.
Until now, diplomats say, negotiations
have been mainly about
promises on paper. The time has come
to ensure that commitments are kept in
practice. Such a strong monitoring system
would also set a precedent for
Turkey, providing wary EU governments
with a last-minute emergency button if
they decided they had to arrest Turkish
progress toward membership after negotiations
had started.
Plenty more hopeful entrants are
lining up. This spring, the European
Commission recommended opening
membership negotiations with Croatia.
In one of its most glowing assessments
ever, the Commission praised Croatia's
economic achievements as exceeding
those of Romania and Bulgaria. It described
Croatia as a functioning market
economy, a distinction that Romania has
yet to earn.
Croatia's biggest stumbling-block
was its perceived lack of cooperation
with the International War Crimes Tribunal,
but the Tribunal's chief prosecutor,
Carla del Ponte, has now stated that
the new government is doing all it can to
send indicted war criminals to The
Hague. If that trend continues, Croatia
will be on a fast track to EU membership,
although few expect it to join before
2009. One EU official said it would
take a miracle for Croatia to join in
2007, as Zagreb hopes, simply for technical
reasons. Like all the candidates, Croatia
has to adopt and implement the
European Union's 85,000 pages of rules
and regulations, and that is inevitably a
long and arduous process.
The encouragement given to Croatia,
however, sends a political signal to
the entire Balkans that the European
Union is serious about admitting the
countries of the region, albeit one by
one, rather than as a bloc. The pace of
progress will be up to the countries
themselves. In the words of Chris Patten,
the European Commissioner for External
Affairs, there can be no question of
"their pretending to reform and our pretending
to believe them."
The European Union seems to be in
no hurry to assess the readiness of the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,
which formally applied for membership
in March, after stepping back from
the brink of civil war just three years ago.
Serious concerns also remain over the
stability of Albania and Bosnia and the
viability of Serbia and Montenegro. The
unresolved final status of Kosovo complicates
the situation further. While described
as potential candidates, none of
these countries are expected to join by
the end of the decade.
The door also remains open to
Switzerland, Norway and Iceland, West
European countries that would easily
qualify for membership, but which have
always preferred to stay outside the
mainstream of European integration. Although
the three countries have given no
recent signs of willingness to become EU
members, Eurobarometer polls organized
by the Commission consistently show
that EU citizens would love these prosperous
neighbors to join. The country
they consistently put at the bottom of
their preference list is Turkey.
In December, however, EU leaders
are due to decide whether Turkey should
be allowed to start accession talks. Their
decision could change the face of the European
Union even more radically than
the admission of the former Communist
countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Mr. Verheugen has warned against any
further delay, because of increasing opposition
to Turkish entry in EU member
countries.
If Turkey's hopes of EU membership
are dashed, Mr. Verheugen says, the
country's process of democratization
will effectively be halted, and, in the long
run, the European Union's leaders will
be responsible for a loss of stability and
predictability in a country of huge
strategic importance. EU leaders have
praised the political reforms introduced
by the government of Prime Minister
Tayyip Erdogan, even though doubts remain
about their implementation. The
Yes vote of the Turkish Cypriots in the
referendum on the UN peace plan for
Cyprus this spring will also strengthen
Ankara's case.
But Eastward enlargement has already
heightened fears across Europe
about massive inflows of immigrants
and loss of influence for the founding
EU member states within an amorphous
25-nation Union. The prospect of Turkish
membership has brought those fears
to a head. In the run-up to the European
Parliament elections in June, political
talk shows on French and German television
featured heated debates on two
questions:Where should the borders of
the European Union end? And is Turkey
really in Europe? In France, the governing
UMP party has come out against
Turkish membership.
In Germany, home to two million
immigrants of Turkish origin, Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder strongly supports
Turkey's aspirations, but the opposition
Christian Democrats are arguing for a
"privileged partnership" with Ankara,
short of membership. In Austria, all the
main political parties oppose Turkish
membership. The leader of the Austrian
Social Democrats, Alfred Gusenbauer,
contends that it would be irresponsible
and dangerous for the European Union
to overstretch itself before it has made
the latest enlargement a success. Bishop
Kurt Krenn of Vienna has openly alluded
to one of the most sensitive, but often
unspoken issues in the debate, the fact
that Turkey is a Muslim country, by calling
Islam a very aggressive kind of religion
that would not allow for political
unity with the Christian faith.
As it takes only one country to veto
a request for membership, many other
EU governments may hide behind
France and Austria. Their doubts may
have less to do with religion than with
Turkey's sheer size and the possibility
that its membership would dilute European
integration. Few can imagine a European
Union in which Turkey would be
the second largest member state after
Germany, or even, in future, the biggest
by 2015, Turkey's fast-rising population
could actually overtake that of Germany.
How much would it cost to extend
the Common Agricultural Policy and
funds for structural and regional development
to Turkey? How many years
would the European Union need before
it could offer millions of Turkish workers
full freedom of movement, and calm
the fears of its own, rapidly aging workforce?
What would be the consequences
of extending the European Union's frontier
to the borders of Iraq, Iran and
Syria, if people who crossed from those
countries into Turkey could then move
freely throughout the Union?
Some of these questions are likely to
be answered in the impact study on the
economic, political and financial consequences
of Turkish accession that the
European Commission is preparing for
the autumn, together with a report on
Turkey's progress in meeting the criteria
for EU entry. Even if Turkey does begin
accession talks next year, they are expected
to take longer than for any other
candidate, perhaps as much as ten years.
Germany has made clear that it cannot
envisage Turkish membership before
2013, when an agreement to maintain
hefty EU subsidies to farmers expires. So
by the time the country is ready to join,
the European Union may be a very different
club from now more loosely organized
and even less generous with its
money. Some analysts speculate that
Ankara might even drop its bid for
membership, once entry negotiations
made clear how difficult it would be for
Turkey to adopt and enforce all the European
Union's rules and regulations.
The decision on Turkey will also
prove an important test for the ten new
EU member states. Busy with their own
accession negotiations, few have managed
to formulate a fully-fledged European
policy. The pro-American Baltic
countries may back Turkey to reflect
support for a NATO ally, especially as
Washington has been campaigning so
vehemently for Turkish EU entry.
"We know how important preparations
for EU membership have been for
our own democratization," said Siim
Kallas, Estonia's member of the European
Commission. "So how could we
close the door to Turkey?" Poland has already
spoken in favor of Turkey, not least
for historical reasons. The Ottoman
Empire never recognized Poland's partition
in the 18th century. "We have already
stopped the Turks from marching
into Europe once, at the siege of Vienna
in 1683," Poland's Foreign Minister
Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz joked, "and
we're not going to do it again." Although
Poland is one of the countries requesting
a specific reference to Europe's Christian
values in the future EU constitution, Polish
diplomats insist that this is not directed
against Turkey. In fact, Turkey's
EU bid is hardly mentioned in the public
debate in Central and Eastern Europe,
and is certainly much less divisive than
in the "old" member states.
Hungary and Slovenia certainly appear
more interested in furthering the
cause of their immediate neighbors in
the Balkans, while Poland is also emphasizing its strategic relationship with
neighboring Ukraine and Belarus. Once
it joins the Union, Romania may push
more energetically for its ethnic brethren
in Moldova.
Geographically at least, the three former
Soviet republics have a better claim
to be part of Europe than does Turkey.
Politically and economically, however,
their case is shakier. Ukraine and
Moldova have repeatedly stated their ambitions
of becoming EU members but,
at least for now, the European Union is
drawing the line at their borders.
Mr. Verheugen has made clear that
the accession of these countries is not on
the EU agenda, although he says the situation
might change in 20 years. For its
neighbors to the East and South, the European
Union is instead proposing closer
political, economic and trade ties, in exchange
for stronger commitments to
democracy and human rights. Tailormade
action plans will be offered to
Ukraine and Moldova, to Belarus if it
embraces democratic reforms, and to the
countries of the Caucasus Armenia,
Azerbaijan and Georgia.
Although nominally included in this
new European "Neighborhood Policy,"
Russia will continue to enjoy special
treatment, with regular bilateral summits
on a par with the United States and
Canada. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian
Prime Minister, has suggested that
Russia (and also Israel) might join the
European Union, but he has received
little support from his colleagues, or indeed
from Moscow. In the Mediterranean
region, the European Union will
prepare separate action plans for Algeria,
Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya,
Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and the Palestinian
Authority.
The policy for all these neighboring
countries has been dubbed "everything
but institutions." In the vision of Romano
Prodi, the President of the European
Commission, Europe needs to
surround itself with a ring of friends, but
they would not become part, for instance,
of the European Commission or
the European Parliament. After wielding
the prospect of membership as its most
effective tool in bringing stability and
democracy to its neighbors, the European
Union risks becoming a victim of
its own success. With 25 members, and
soon 27 or more, it is gradually devising
alternative policies.
Mr. Verheugen, who oversaw the enlargement
process for the last five years,
says that expanding the Union can no
longer be a priority. He believes that
from now on the European Union
should concentrate on deepening, not
on widening. The agenda is already set.
It includes streamlining the decision making
process through a new European
Constitution, boosting economic growth,
ensuring that Europe plays a more coherent
role on the global scene and, last
but not least, reaching out to the increasingly
skeptical man and woman in the
European street.
The next 12 months will show how
fast the European Union can move while
digesting its huge expansion, and how
successfully it can avoid the pitfalls
ahead. Making a success of a Union of 25
nations is not a foregone conclusion. If
the European Union fails to agree on the
Constitution, or several member states
refuse to ratify it, if groups of countries
splinter off to proceed with their own integration
plans, if the economic situation
deteriorates the Big Bang may yet
become a whimper.
Oana Lungescu has been based in Brussels since January 1997, reporting on
European affairs for BBC World Service radio. She has covered EU and NATO enlargement
from Brussels and from
Central and Eastern Europe. She started her journalistic career with the BBC
World Service in London, after leaving Romania in 1985. A regular contributor
to the Brussels-based E!Sharp magazine
and to the European Policy Centre on enlargement issues, she won an Onassis
bursary in 1998 and was awarded a European Woman of Achievement Award by the
European Women's
Union in 2002.
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