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EU Enlargement: Ideas vs. Interests

English Pages, 13. 4. 2000

1. There has been an endless stream of conferences about EU enlargement in the last years in both parts of Europe, in member countries as well as in candidate countries. It is literally impossible to say anything new, productive, provocative, surprising. I can not promise any breakthrough. 

We should, however, know that we make either normative or positive statements. We should differentiate it. I prefer to analyze than to preach.

2. My starting proposition is that the candidate countries – among them the Czech Republic – have a clear and straightforward interest: to participate in the European integration process, not to be left aside or behind, not to stay in a sort of vacuum. They have no real alternative to the entry into the EU.

It should not be forgotten that to enter EU will be costly for them (as it has been costly even before entering). Their citizens are not sufficiently aware of it and they implicitly – and perhaps correctly – assume that it would be more costly not to enter. (To compare both types of costs together with their time structure is, nevertheless, difficult if not impossible.)

There are benefits connected with EU membership as well but they come with a delay and are less tangible than the costs. Nevertheless, this is what the citizens of these countries do not know.

My conclusion is that the candidate countries assume that the benefits are bigger than the costs.

3. Talking about interests, we should define who is on the other side. There is nothing like an EU interest. EU does not behave – in this respect – as an entity. Only individual member countries have an interest (or interests). There is probably one exception. The bigger the EU, the bigger the political role and prestige of EU bureaucracy. As a result of it Brussels is more in favour of enlargement than individual member countries.

4. The individual countries of the EU have a much less clear interest than the candidate countries:

- they know that they do not have the right to close the doors of their own distinguished club and to block other Europeans from entering it (it has, however, no relation to their genuine, down-to-earth interests);

- their interests are very heterogeneous (big vs. small countries, northern vs. southern countries, geographically more distant countries vs. countries close to new members, more agricultural vs. less agricultural countries, rich vs. less rich countries, etc.);

- the signing of association agreements between EU and its future members together with their radical liberalization and widespread opening after the end of communism have led to a situation in which the existing EU members will not gain much from enlargement as compared to what they get now. (The "benefit" curves of members and candidates have different shapes);

- EU members are rationally or irrationally afraid of the costs of enlargement (because of inevitable fiscal transfers from various structural funds, because of the unpleasant problem of sharing farm subsidies, because of potential domestic employment problems caused by labour flows from new member countries, etc.).

We can say that the member countries assume that the costs of EU enlargement will be higher than the benefits.

5. The serious (and fair) question is the following one: will the interests of both groups of countries – in the situation of asymmetric motivations – coincide? I have to insist that to raise such a question is not an expression of defeatist Europessimism, that it is – on the contrary – an expression of responsible Eurorealism. The refusal to accept such a question is either Euronaivism or a sheer hypocracy.

6. Serious preparations (or homeworks) are unavoidable on both sides:

- future members must be able to fulfil the Maastricht macroeconomic criteria (with all accompanying consequences) and to strenghten the microstructure of their economies. They have to harmonise their legislation before entry;

- EU has to make institutional changes, otherwise it would not be able to deal with more than 15 current members.

I do not want to speculate whose task is more difficult, but I dare to challenge the dominant view that the unfulfilled tasks of the candidate countries represent the only existing obstacle to enlargement.

7. Much more substantial for all of us is the issue of sustainability of current EU economic and social practices (and of the ideologies behind them). In my understanding the current system is, at least in the long run, untenable. The question is whether there is an easy way to change it – in an entity which has an undeniable democratic deficit as well as a non-negligible, geographically given, distance between individual citizens and politicians in Brussels.

We need marginal, incremental, evolutionary changes (and they will be – eventually – realized), but we need more radical or revolutionary changes as well. Europe (or the Euroland) has been in the past decades a victim of a creeping bureaucratization, of an increasing regulatory activism, of nonreceding protectionism and of soft and all-embracing paternalism on the one hand and of increasing "planetary" ambitions vis-à-vis "Le dèfi americain" or the Asian challenge on the other. Both processes are wrong.

I do not intend to discuss these issues here today in detail but I feel obliged to mention them at least. They should not belong to "untouchable" topics.

There is no other field where it can be seen better than in current attempts to deal with the long-lasting European unemployment problem. EU should forget the idea that there is a fixed stock of jobs in Europe. The EU politicians should change their counter-productive recommendations which I would summarise in the following way. They suggest:

- to stay home (to women)

- to stay in schools (to youngsters)

- to share jobs (to the rest of us).

If Europe keeps insisting on such ideas there will be no future – with or without enlargement.

Appendix: Two remarks

I am often asked about the connection between the EU and EMU membership. It is for us not the issue of the day now but I see as an interim solution the participation of new EU members in ERM II. Other experiments are not necessary, especially we should not accept either an early euroization (à la dollarization) of our currencies or the obligatory establishment of currency boards. It would considerably increase the costs of preaccession era.

Relatively new, suddenly fashionable idea is the concept of the so called flexibility of EU, or to put it differently, of a two-tier EU, based on hard-core members (inner-core) and other members (periphery). I consider it a very misleading proposition – especially for future members. It sounds positively because it indicates some sort of freedom of choice for individual countries but it is not true. On the contrary, it is the fastest way to promote political union and to give a special, dominant role to the hard-core countries. It was explicitly stated by the Commission that the idea of flexibility "was conceived for those who wanted to advance forward", not for those "who want to advance backwards and reduce integration or extract themselves from certain policies". This special "flexibility" is a method to force less enthusiastic countries into accepting EU unionistic policies. It has no connection with more diversity because it requires to accept the acqui communautaire in full. Candidate countries have to accept the entire acquis, not only part of them, before entering.

Václav Klaus, Notes for Institute of International Finance Spring Membership Meeting, Hague, April 13, 2000.