Overcoming the teething problems

The course of true love never runs smooth. Well it's the same of accession to the European Union, as Poland discovered in May. The Commission announced that it was cutting off some £27 million in aid to Poland under the Phare programme. The Polish Government's spending plans did not conform to EU requirements and the plans were submitted too close to the deadline to be reworked.

Although the cash total was not huge in itself, set against a 199799 EU overall allocation of £500 million, the dent in public pride meant political reverberations in Poland were considerable. The Prime Minister, Jerzy Buzek, stepped in to sideline Risczard Czarnecki, leader of the ZCHN, the catholic nationalist wing of Solidarity alliance (AWS), who was in charge of the key inter-ministerial Committee for European Integration (KIE).

Buzek took personal control of the KIE which consists of the chief Polish accession negotiator, Jan Kulakowski, and eight ministers, including Foreign Minister, Bronislaw Geremek, and which collectively co-ordinates work on the accession programme and relations with Brussels. Yet, despite a willingness by diplomats and EU officials to acknowledge a strong Polish determination to drive their reform programme and accession process forward, few are completely convinced that administrative confusion has been overcome. One diplomat described the structure as "somewhat baroque - three pianos and a violin".

A former minister and opposition spokesman on privatisation, Wieslaw Kaczmarek, speaks of confusion of responsibilities combined with a weakness of economic direction and argues that the move did not signify a change in strategy by Buzek. "We are losing time in preparing businesses and enterprises for the new challenges," claims the former communist.

Jaroslaw Pietras, the undersecretary of state at the KIE, argues the process is working - "the most important thing is forward movement" in what he describes as a learning process for both sides.

HE DEFENDS the structure as reflecting the realities of the need to hold together a complex coalition.

Pietras complains at some of the rigidities in the EU approach. Some of the tasks being asked of Poland, he says, are both expensive and likely to be unnecessary - in agriculture they are being asked to put in place expensive monitoring of production which is only likely to prove crucial if Polish farmers are to get compensation payments from the EU. Yet the EU's own Agenda 2000 makes clear the intention is not to do so.

In other cases, he says, best practise, cost, or simplicity would suggest there are better ways of getting to the same result but the Union has a one-size-fits-all approach - Poland could be allowed, for example, to reduce emissions substantially from one factory instead of by small amounts from three. The result would be substantial cost savings with the same overall pollution.

Poland's Ambassador to the EU, Jan Truszczynski, accepts there have been some problems in refocusing EU Phare aid on accession objectives.

"We had grown used to cash more or less in line with our priorities - the adjustment is not easy," he admits. "It has changed and it is quite difficult for many people, not only in Poland but in throughout central Europe, to accept that from last year on money can only be used to align ourselves with the acquis communautaire. And the process of coming to terms with that reality was somewhat painful." But, he insists, talks on next year's programme are going much more smoothly.

He acknowledges Polish concerns that talk in Brussels is of Poland not being ready to enter the Union until 2005. The issue was raised by Buzek in his recent visit to the Commission.

"We, very much like the other applicants, have picked a notional date of December 31st, 2002, as a date for our readiness to join and meet the requirements of membership minus a limited number of transitional arrangements," the ambassador says. "This is nothing but a technical assumption which helps us to structure our preparations and helps us to be sufficiently precise when we declare that we are able to take something on board, or conversely that something is sufficiently difficult for us to envisage a transitional arrangement. "The year 2003 has also been taken by the European Commission as the technical assumption when preparing the proposals on the EU budget for the years 20002006. But we do believe the date is not unrealistic economically or politically as the eventual date of our entry into the EU."

Talk of a long-term time frame is "rather demoralising" and can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. "It is not in the interests of EU itself," he says. Pietras argues that the member states are underestimating the dynamics of the Polish reform process. The Polish advantage over previous acceding countries, he argues, lies in not having to reform complex already-existing regulations but starting from scratch. "We do not face what might be called the tyranny of the status quo," he says.

Because of where Poland is coming from, "in comparison to other changes we are making, the specific changes being made for the EU are cosmetic".

He insists that any post-accession transitional arrangements sought by Poland will be strictly limited in scope and duration and will not affect the functioning of the single market. Both officials are coy about Poland's attitude to the institutional reform debate going on inside the EU, except to say that the acceding countries should be given an input.

Pietras says they are looking with interest at the experience of Spain which has a similar population and would expect to be given the same rights.