Is all quiet on the EU’s eastern front?

By Dana Spinant

Date: 28/04/05

Despite predictions that a big-bang enlargement would wreak havoc with the EU institutions, the accession of ten new states to the Union one year ago did not have the feared impact. Presented by some analysts as a sort of institutional 'millennium bug' that would paralyse the EU's decision-making bodies, the 1 May 2004 enlargement appears to have been easily digested by the Union's institutions.

The biggest problem lingering one year on is that of translation. The increase from 11 to 20 official languages and the difficulty in recruiting and training interpreters and translators has led to delays in the adoption of decisions in the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. "Translation is the only bottleneck. No other catastrophe-scenario materialised," one Parliament official said.

The institution that was supposed to be most affected by enlargement was the Council of Ministers, which represents the member states. Enlargement increased the number of people round the table by two-thirds and so made more difficult the task of reconciling more, and more divergent, governments' interests.

But a senior Council official says that negotiations are neither significantly lengthier nor more acrimonious. "We are more efficient, funnily enough, because we are forced to be more business-like. Enlargement imposed some self-restraint. Before, ministers could afford to make longer speeches, side-remarks, jokes, because they were not under enormous time pressure. Now, they know from the outset that they should only speak when they have to."

Partly this is down to changes in the rules of procedure but also, the official believes, because of the style of the new states' representatives. "They tend to be very business-like, focused, no-nonsense, they see their participation in Council meetings in terms of problem-solving and not of big diplomatic speeches."

According to one new member state ambassador to the EU, the fact that the ten countries have generally appointed younger EU ambassadors (with the exception of Poland) has also helped.

Voting is more common. Even though EU treaties allowed ever more qualified majority voting in the Council, instead of unanimity, ministers have traditionally tried to reach consensus as often as possible, to avoid marginalising member states. "[Since 1 May], we had to drop the consensus mania," said one minister from an 'old' member state. "It is not possible to maintain the same please-all policy at 25. We are more pragmatic. We vote and if we have the necessary number of votes to adopt a decision, too bad for those against," he added.

A certain element of "unpredictability" has been added to the Council's working, a senior official said, because of the occasional failure to co-ordinate the respective positions of different ministries in a new member state.

"Or sometimes one member state changes its position between two meetings, because in the meantime somebody realised that their position ought to be different." Poland's attempted U-turn on a law on software patents is the most notorious case.

Fears that the functioning of the College of European commissioners would be severely affected by enlargement, with the increase in its membership from 20 to 25, have not been realised. In a study for Notre Europe, a French think-tank led by former Commission heavyweights Jacques Delors and Pascal Lamy, John Peterson alleges that "future historians may well conclude that the 2004 enlargement ended up giving the Commission fresh doses of sorely-needed vigour and vitality".

Two things have helped prevent an adverse effect on the College's performance: the managerial skills of President José Manuel Barroso, who is able to keep Commission meetings short and draw conclusions at the end of the debate, something his predecessor Romano Prodi was not very good at, and the quality of new member states' commissioners. "The dynamic of the College is not like the old guys and the beginners," a senior Commission official said. "New and old states' commissioners make a comparable impact on debates. The only thing that matters is the personal quality of the commissioner."

Lithuania's Dalia Grybauskaite, responsible for the important budget brief, and Estonia's Siim Kallas, in charge of administration and audit, are widely respected.

By contrast commissioners from important old member states, such as Italian Franco Frattini or UK's Peter Mandelson, are pulling below their countries' political weight.

Analysts believe that while the inner functioning of the Parliament was not significantly affected by enlargement, the addition of 162 MEPs from the new member states has changed the style of the political debate. The biggest parties, the centre-right EPP-ED and the centre-left Socialists are accustomed to making compromises on anything from the election of the assembly's president to changes of rules of procedure.

But the new states' MEPs have introduced a more confrontational style familiar from national party-politics. "The new MEPs from the left feel that they have to criticise the right in plenary and the other way around. They present things more in black and white, while for the old ones, it is more like shades of grey," one Parliament official said, adding: "The debate has more potential to attract the media and the public when it is more confrontational."

Twelve months on, it appears that the EU institutions have digested well the big-bang enlargement. The same is not true of public opinion.

Major analysis feature in which the author takes a look at the impact of the 2004 enlargement on the functioning of the EU's institutions. She suggests that after one year of EU25 wide-spread worries that the EU's policy-making might come to a standstill were not confirmed at all and that the only bottleneck were the EU's translation services, struggling to find staff for the new official languages.

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