Gunter Verheugen, the German Social Democrat in charge of enlargement at the European Commission, is looking a little more relaxed these days, though he’s not demob-happy quite yet.
After giving the European Union’s 10 incoming members a fairly clean bill of health, the moment is approaching when he will be out of a job, as Brussels will no longer need a vast enlargement directorate with hundreds of eurocrats haggling over single market rules and milk quotas with Estonians, Slovaks and Maltese. Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and the next wave of Balkan wannabees pose a more modest challenge.
Enlargement may be another dreary euro-word, but next May’s ”big bang” will transform the political and economic map of the continent. Nothing on this scale has ever happened before or will ever again — unless Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gets his way and wangles membership for Russia and Israel. His latest spat with his once and future rival, Romano Prodi, over Vladimir Putin, the Yukos affair and Chechnya, suggested they don’t see eye to eye on Russia.
Prodi was also aghast at the commission’s poll showing that Europeans see Israel as a greater threat to world peace than Iran, North Korea and the United States. However, his contrition is unlikely to extend to proposing membership for the Jewish state.
Turkey remains the toughest nut to crack, with many arguing — especially in France — that a country of 68-million Muslims should never be allowed to join, despite public insistence that the union is not a ”Christian club”.
Yet the prospect of membership has brought undeniable progress on human rights and democracy. The trick is to persuade the generals in Ankara that a peace settlement in Cyprus is in their interest. After next May the Greek Cypriots — armed with a veto, like everyone else — are hardly going to be rooting for the Turks. Verheugen’s final and most delicate task will be to decide whether they have met the criteria for starting negotiations. Governments, though, will have the last word.
It is too late to do much about the readiness of next year’s intake: all have signed their accession treaties, and all bar Cyprus have held referendums ratifying membership. It is one of the more worrying aspects of the European scene that most of the candidates voted overwhelmingly to join, while the current 15 worry rightly about losing plebiscites on the Constitution, the euro or, in Britain’s case, both.
Verheugen saw last week’s monitoring reports as a final chance to lick the 10 into shape because, once in, they will break the rules just like the existing members, today facing more than 1 000 legal challenges for infringing EU law — to say nothing of French and German attempts to escape punishment for flouting eurozone budget deficit limits.
Poland, biggest and stroppiest of the new boys, got the worst report card. Warnings to the Slovenes, Czechs and others were real, but were partially designed to mask the fact that Warsaw is lagging so far behind.
The reality of a 25-member club is already here: the Poles — encouraged by the hard-nosed Spanish — are throwing their weight around in the constitutional negotiations.
Britain’s problems, despite Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown’s transparently disingenuous grandstanding about ”fiscal federalism”, are minor by comparison. Europe’s once familiar landscape is changing — and far faster than we realise. — Â