Blind to the truth

The endgame has begun, and that's official.
The European Union's money is on the table, and all the candidate countries for EU membership have to do is pick it up and put it in the bank. Or stand and fight for more.
It was utterly predictable that last week the Danish Prime Minister should inform his counterparts from the 10 countries about to join the club that there is very limited room for manoeuvre on the financial package available. He didn't quite have the nerve to claim that there was no room for manoeuvre at all.
It was also utterly predictable that European Affairs Minister Danuta Huebner should describe the EU's financial offer as "not satisfactory".
What Anders Fogh Rassmussen actually said was that, when it comes to direct payments for farmers - which is what enlargement is all about for large sections of Polish society - what you see is what you get.
"A very difficult negotiation leading to the offer on direct payments makes it very unlikely that the European Council in Copenhagen should be able to arrive at another result than the offer on direct payments agreed in Brussels," he said.
He might be bluffing, but what is now evident is that if the Poles want flexibility on money, they might do well to take swift action in other areas where concern is growing in Brussels.
Take corruption, for instance. A conference in Brussels last week called "Fighting Corruption in an Enlarged EU: How to remedy it" emphasised worries about "severe" problems in getting to grips with endemic corruption and bribery in some of the candidate countries.

Miklos Marschall, the executive director of Transparency International, a global corruption-busting NGO, said the problem in the smaller candidate states of Estonia, Slovenia, Hungary, and Lithuania is not as bad as expected. In fact, these nations ranked higher than one current EU country - Greece - in a recent poll of public sector corruption in more than 100 nations.
But he said more serious problems persist in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Poland is implementing changes in its courts, including crucial improvements in judicial independence through the entry into force of the Act on Common Courts in Poland.
There is greater transparency in the judiciary too, but the key issue in the spotlight now, in relation to EU membership, is corruption.
One way to curb corruption is to decrease state ownership in the economy - not something many candidate state politicians want to listen to, as is patently obvious in Poland
And there were dividends for those politicians prepared to risk popularity by recognising the link between democracy and market reforms. Such stirrings were evident in many accession countries, including the Baltics, Hungary and Poland, Marschall said, but there is also a negative correlation - between privatisation and corruption.
Less privatisation leads to less democracy, which leads to higher corruption in many countries.
For Marschall, these points are so evident that it is puzzling that they are ignored by the political elites in transition economies in the former Soviet Union countries.
In Poland's case, the Supreme Chamber of Control published a report last year on the management of state-owned firms, and it led to a new strategy to tackle corruption.
But since then there have been no developments in terms of adopted legislation, according to Transparency International.

And on the organisation's "Corruption Perception Index" for this year, Poland is ranked 45th of 102 in a league table based on "levels of corruption in the public sector as perceived by business people, country analysts and ordinary people".
By this measure, Finland is the least corrupt nation on earth, at number one, and Bangladesh is the most corrupt at 102. Poland, at number 45, is in the right half of the pitch, only just behind Greece (44), and ahead of the Czech and Slovak republics (jointly 52nd) and Turkey (64).
But more is expected, and promises of more are not enough. That is why the Commission is regularly monitoring all the applicants as the endgame is played out, to ensure they meet their membership pledges.
Brussels, of course, is full of action plans, strategies, blueprints and pledges which never amount to anything.
But Poland is, of course, not yet in the club, and only full club members can get away with not turning words into deeds.