Questionnaire paves road towards enlargement east

Date: 02/05/1996

Each applicant country has been asked to complete a series of questions on its suitability for Union membership. Thomas Klau examines this mostly symbolic exercise.

JUST four months after the crucial EU summit in Madrid, the preparations for enlargement have begun in earnest.

The nine officially designated Central and Eastern European membership candidates were this week handed a 165-page Commission questionnaire, covering 23 areas of EU cooperation, to be completed by the end of July.

The answers to the voluminous document - a standard element of any enlargement procedure - are intended to serve as the basis for the Commission's avis (opinion) on the applicant states' suitability for membership of the Union.

While the nine questionnaires are broadly similar, the documents have been individually reviewed and adapted to reflect each candidate's specific circumstances.

“It would be absurd to ask the Slovaks about their fisheries policy,” explains one EU official familiar with the document, adding: “In some cases, the questionnaire also takes up specific questions raised by an applicant state.”

The relatively short period in which the applicant countries must draft their replies reflects the fact that the information the they have been asked to provide is “fairly standard statistical stuff”, according to another official.

The bulk of the questions focus on the Union's acquis in single market legislation, where the Commission is currently engaged in a wide-ranging cooperation and advice-giving exercise to help the enlargement candidates adapt their own laws to comply with the Union's rules.

On these issues, “we could provide most of the answers ourselves”, says a Commission official involved in drawing up the document. “From our point of view, the questionnaire is largely a symbolic exercise. The aim is to avoid giving the accession candidates the impression that we will draw up our avis without having consulted them first.”

While the Commission's DGIa, the Directorate-General responsible for external political relations, coordinated the questionnaire exercise, virtually every directorate-general contributed to the document. “Input has come from all across the Commission,” said one official.

While single market issues are being explored in considerable detail, the questionnaire devotes only two chapters to questions related to the Maastricht Treaty's second and third 'pillars' which enshrine the Union's cooperation in foreign and security matters and home affairs and judicial policies.

Inside observers, however, point to the fact that these two largely intergovernmental areas of Union cooperation do not fit easily into an exercise as comparatively rigid as that of a questionnaire.

The instruments which EU countries have developed in these policy fields to overcome minority dissent, such as the Schengen Agreement creating a passport-free zone within the Union, or to heighten efficiency, as in the foreign policy practice of establishing contact groups, are frequently located outside Community law, and thus do not belong to the acquis communautaire which enlargement countries are supposed to adopt when they join the EU.

Furthermore, the consensus achieved amongst almost all member states that the second and third pillars are the two treaty areas most urgently in need of review and improvement during the Intergovernmental Conference on EU reform means that a detailed assessment of the applicant countries' ability to adapt to existing common policies makes little sense, since it is impossible to say how far the Union's acquis will have changed by the time they join. “We are in full development here,” explains an official. “Nobody can say how these (treaty) areas will look in a few years' time.”

Officials acknowledge, however, that justice and home affairs policies, conventions and other agreements, although rarely discussed in the enlargement context, might well raise some of the thorniest legal and political questions of the whole accession process.

Due mainly to a lack of agreement between the UK and its continental partners, member states have resorted to bypassing British opposition by giving their cooperation a legal foothold outside Community law, as in the case of the Schengen Agreement.

While this would make applicant countries free, in theory, to decide whether they wanted to participate in the Union majority's cooperation effort, or side with London in abstaining from common policies, there is a strong drive within the Commission to pressurise the would-be member states into producing a declaration stressing their readiness to sign up to the full gamut of existing EU policies.

Another particularly difficult issue is that of the applicant countries' respect for the democratic principles which - next to the geographical requirement of being 'European' - provide the Union with its common political foundation.

The near-impossibility of asking governments to make a detailed assessment of the validity of their own democratic institutions, or the extent to which their judges are free to make their rulings without direct political interference, has led the Commission to ask only for a 'summary' of the constitutional, institutional and legislation situation in each country.

But with the example of Slovakia - whose membership prospects are being increasingly damaged by the sometimes less-than democratic behaviour of its democratically elected government - in mind, the Commission began its questionnaire with a stern reminder that the state of democracy in the applicant country would be fully taken into account in the membership avis.

Reflecting the conclusions of the Copenhagen summit in June 1993, this would include, the Commission stresses, an assessment of the rule of law, the state of human rights and the protection of minorities.

As officials are keen to point out, the questionnaire's apparent avoidance of some of the trickier subjects and the probably limited novelty value of many of the answers the accession candidates are likely to come up with - not to mention the problems caused by sometimes grossly unreliable statistics - should not obscure the fact that the completion of the questionnaires constitutes another crucial step in the enlargement process.

“This sets a machinery in motion which it would not be easy to stop,” says a Commission official. “We expect to come up with our avis before the end of the year, and this should give a clear new impetus to the whole of the enlargement discussion.”

For the Central and Eastern European accession candidates, meanwhile, the questionnaire is a visible sign that the EU, despite its current concentration on its own internal reform, is following up on the political commitment given in Madrid last December to start the first membership negotiations six months after the end of the IGC.

But while few now doubt that the beginning of the accession negotiations will proceed as scheduled, the date of actual accession for the first successful membership applicants remains open to speculation and controversy.

The need for the would-be members to take on all of the Union' acquis as updated during the IGC negotiations means that “nobody is going to join before the ratification procedure (of the IGC results) has been completed in all 15 existing members states”, stresses one official.

As the example of Maastricht shows, this alone could take several years.

And in a further threat to speedy enlargement, there is strong pressure from within the European Parliament to delay the candidates' full inclusion in the EU by at least another decade or so, in order to provide for a step-by-step phase-in of the Central and East European countries into existing EU policies, and delay the full impact of their admission on Community spending.

Such considerations, however, are being met with increasing impatience by politicians and intellectuals in the East.

Andras Inotai, the head of Hungary's World Economic Research Institute, used a conference in Warsaw last weekend to urge the Union to decide on a concrete strategy for Eastern enlargement.

“We must consider the consequences of the fact that, seven years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, we still do not have a vision about what the future could be,” he warned.

It is a warning that many within the EU are echoing with increasing urgency.