ACCESSION TALKS: (UN)REAL NEGOTIATIONS
accession countries pointed out that the EU was enlarging on the cheap.
The whole enlargement package cost the EU a bit more than EUR 13 billion per year for the period 2004–6, representing about 0.05 per cent of EU GDP (Ludlow, 2004, p. 345) which, on the other hand, represents quite a decent gain of more than 1 per cent of the GDP for the ten accession countries each year. However, the accession countries also seemed to be quite concerned with their relative gains. This was especially the case with the Visegrad countries and Slovenia, which got much less per capita than the Baltic countries (ibid., p. 241).
However, there were other issues which did not have such a clear redistributive character but which also proved controversial. Except for Slovenia, most EU candidates (especially Poland), fearing a cheap sell- out of their assets, asked for transition periods in the chapter on the free movement of capital, which touched upon the purchase of real estate. Hence transition periods were agreed which constrained the right of non-residents to buy agricultural land and secondary residences in the accession countries ranging from seven to twelve years after accession. On the opposite side, many EU members (particularly Germany and Austria) were afraid that their labour markets would be fl ooded with cheap labour from the CEECs if the free movement of persons were allowed from the fi rst day of accession.
Unusually, it was the EU which asked for the transition period in this case.
Eventually, a transition period of up to seven years was agreed during which the old EU members can protect their labour markets against the infl ows of labour from the new EU members.
The cases for transition periods in both chapters were based on political sensitivities rather than on objective evidence. Therefore, it was quite easy for the EU negotiators to link these two issues in the accession talks, presenting them as a trade-off between two politically sensitive packages (Boruta, 2002). On this basis, it was possible to disregard a host of studies which pointed to the low migratory potential of the CEECs and, hence, to the absence of the threats to the EU labour markets. Compared to this, the chapter on environment, which was often mentioned as one of the more diffi cult chapters, was relatively easy to conclude. Despite the high costs of implementation of the measures for environmental protection, there was a consensus about its benefi ts for the badly damaged environments in accession countries.
However, some chapters were more specifi c to the countries involved. It was the case that the more diffi cult the chapter was for a given country, the longer it took to fi nish the negotiations. Therefore the review of these late chapters, disregarding agriculture and budget which were intentionally left for the very end of the negotiations, provides us with an insight into where the greatest challenges were.
To start with, Lithuania was the only CEEC which had closed all of the chapters before the Danish presidency started (Ludlow, 2004). However, the last of these chapters was energy. This was sensitive for Lithuania as the country was forced to close its nuclear power plant in Ignalina, based on Chernobyl technology. In exchange, Lithuania was able to gain signifi cant fi nancial assistance from the EU.
On the other hand, Latvia put off the closure of the institutional chapter as it felt underrepresented in the Council. Latvia was offered four votes there, being put in the same category as Luxembourg or neighbouring Estonia. Disagreeing with this, Latvia argued that, on the basis of its population, it should get somewhat closer to the seven votes of neighbouring Lithuania. However, the EU did not budge on this issue and, eventually, Latvia had to accept the original offer. In contrast, Slovenia had troubles in regional policy. Being relatively rich and small, Slovenia could not tap into the EU money for underdeveloped regions. Therefore it came up with a new administrative division of the country into two regions, the poorer of which would qualify for EU funds. However, the EU rejected this. Estonia could not close the energy chapter for some time as it tried to delay the liberalization of its energy market, being afraid of Finnish competition.
It was thanks to Finnish generosity that Estonia was able to get a lengthy transition period at the end of the day (Ludlow, 2004, p. 116).
Like Lithuania, Slovakia agreed to shut its nuclear power plant in Jaslovské Bohunice. However, it still had two chapters to close on the eve of the Danish presidency. First, there was regional policy, where the EU had doubts about the Slovak administrative capacity for handling EU funds. Second, there was competition, where Slovakia extended generous tax breaks to foreign investors, which some EU countries saw as unfair subsidies which threatened their own competitiveness. Eventually, Slovakia was given the benefi t of the doubt concerning its administrative capacity, and it was agreed that the tax breaks had to be phased out.
Similarly, the Czech Republic also struggled with competition policy.
However, it was state aid to the steel industry rather than tax incentives for foreign capital that was the main stumbling block. The EU did not oppose the state aid as such; however, it insisted that the aid had to be one-off and not repeated in future (Telička and Barták, 2003, pp. 102–19). In this respect, it took some time before the Czech government produced a plan which the EU found convincing. Like the Latvians, the Czechs also had objections to the institutional chapter. They pointed out that they were underrepresented in the European Parliament, being offered two fewer seats than Belgium or Portugal, which had the same population. However, unlike the Latvians, they were able to drive their point home by the end of the accession talks. Moreover, the Czech Republic hesitated with the closure of
the chapter on transport, where the EU, under pressure from Germany and Austria, insisted on a transition period constraining the access of hauliers from the CEECs to the single market. Eventually, the Czech negotiators had to give in.
Poland had troubles with the competition policy as it had to phase out tax breaks, like Slovakia, and, like the Czech Republic, to reinvigorate its steel industry in a way that would be compatible with EU rules. Again like Slovakia, Poland did not seem able to cope with administrative requirements for the distribution of regional aid; however, it was eventually given the benefi t of the doubt. Unlike the other candidates, Poland struggled with justice and home affairs due to its long borders with Belarus and Ukraine (Ludlow, 2004, p. 119). While the EU countries asked Poland for information about the protection of the border which the Poles considered too sensitive to provide, the Poles asked for funds for the maintenance of the border which were not foreseen in the enlargement package.
Hungary had similar problems as Slovakia with competition policy and regional policy, and it had the very same problem as the Czech Republic with underrepresentation in the European Parliament. Therefore Hungary also closed all three chapters with similar results as was the case with Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In addition, the EU raised some concerns in the areas of culture and audiovisual policy when the government of Prime Minister Orbán interfered with the media, preventing a successful closure of the chapter until a new media law was passed (Ludlow, 2004, p. 120).
To sum up, as expected, issues connected with fi nancial fl ows (agriculture, budget, free movement of capital) and the movement of people proved to be the most controversial in the accession talks, as it was in these areas where the important costs and benefi ts were expected in all of the countries. Moreover, these issues were easy to quantify, which often allowed the boiling down of their complexity to a single number, making the issues presentable in media discourse, although at the price of a gross distortion. However, there were also other issues which accession countries had to struggle with, such as competition policy, which was to constrain their ability to attract foreign capital by tailor-made tax incentives as well as their ability to subsidize ailing companies, or regional policy where the accession countries’ administrative capacity had to be developed. Nevertheless, despite these overlaps, each accession country had to deal with its own unique confi guration of issues distinct from others.
The Absence of Mutual Cooperation
The CEECs were often perceived as a block of very similar countries, which raised both hopes and fears of their coordinated march into the EU.
However, such a march failed to materialize. First, the accession countries considered one another as competitors rather than as partners (Boruta, 2002), and the EU encouraged this kind of attitude. Second, despite sharing some interests, each accession country was very much in a unique position.
On the one hand, there were several fora in which accession countries tried to coordinate their position towards the EU. These included the ten fast-track countries (all the candidates except for Bulgaria and Romania), the fi rst-wave countries (Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia), and the Visegrad countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia). These networks provided the framework for regular consultations, but only rarely were any common positions agreed, and even then one or more countries defected from the common position at the earliest possible opportunity.
The EU encouraged this mutual competition using an ‘icebreaker tactic’
(Friis, 2002, p. 17), which consisted of trying ‘to break the ice with one country and then hope that others will follow suit by accepting more or less the same deal’. It usually worked. Thus, it was Slovenia that broke the ice in the environmental chapter, the Czech Republic was the fi rst to conclude the free movement of capital, and Hungary was the quickest to accept the free movement of persons (Friis, 2002). Obviously, this kind of icebreaking undermined any potential for cooperation. The last attempt at it came on the eve of the Copenhagen Summit when the heads of governments of the Visegrad countries agreed to press for a higher share of direct payments in the fi nancial package than offered by the EU. However, Poland and the Czech Republic made separate deals with the Danish presidency in the fi nal hours of the summit, to the great disappointment of Hungary and Slovakia (Ludlow, 2004, pp. 109–10).
The only example of successful cooperation among the candidate countries is that between the Czech Republic and Slovakia after Slovakia was invited to the accession talks in 1999. Prague supported the Slovak effort to catch up with the fi rst-wave countries by providing intensive consultations and the transfer of the accession-related know-how.
However, there was more successful cooperation between some candidate countries and some EU members. Hence Poland had very close links with Germany (Lippert et al., 2001b, p. 21), and Germany repeatedly let it be known that without Poland no enlargement was possible. Similarly, the Baltic countries benefi ted from the support of the Nordic countries. More specifi cally, Finland felt itself to be a sponsor of Estonia while Denmark felt strongly pro-Lithuania (Ludlow, 2004, p. 105).
To sum up, experience from the accession talks does not point to any blocks of CEECs in the making, apart from the special relationship between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, whose role in EU governance would be comparable to, for example, Benelux or the Nordic countries. In contrast,
one can expect the development on patterns of cooperation which cut across the border between old and new member states, such as cooperation between Germany and Poland, or between Nordic and Baltic countries.