Tensions rise as EU end game begins

The European Union and ex-communist Central Europe squabbled last week over the conduct of membership negotiations in a sign of rising tension as final stage talks on the EU's historic eastward expansion begin. Poland and the Czech Republic warned they would rather let the EU entry timetable slip than accept unfavorable membership terms presented at the last minute on a non-negotiable basis. Denmark, which takes over the EU's rotating presidency this week and has made enlargement the overriding priority of its tenure, told the Poles they risk a major delay to joining the union if they let the December target for a deal pass them by. In Brussels the EU slotted in an extra round of enlargement negotiations to try to keep the program for admitting up to 10 mainly East European states in 2004 on track. It opened talks on agriculture policy just a week after EU leaders at their Seville summit failed to agree on the key issue of direct payments to East European farmers. At the insistence of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who faces a tough federal election battle in September, the 15 EU members have postponed until at least November a decision on whether costly subsidies should be extended eastward.

Schroeder later said a decision might not come until the Copenhagen summit in December, effectively leaving the candidates no time to lobby for changes or extract concessions in other areas in return for agreeing the farm subsidies deal. That strategy risks a backlash in candidate states, where voters already suspect they are being offered second-class membership terms and where a bad deal would sour prospects for success in referendums on EU entry terms due next year. Polish Foreign Minister Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz said he had warned EU ministers last week against delaying tactics. "If normal conditions are not created for negotiations, then we will demand (talks) are extended," the minister said. "We will not be blackmailed into accepting that the enlargement train leaves at a particular time." The candidates fear the EU will take advantage of their desire to join the bloc as soon as possible by using brinkmanship to keep the cost of admitting new members low. They are responding with brinksmanship of their own. "A difference of two to four weeks does not carry historical meaning," Cimoszewicz told daily Gazeta Wyborcza. "Let's do everything possible to aim to join on Jan. 1 (2004) but let's not attach too much weight to it." But Denmark warned that was a dangerous tactic. "What you cannot solve in Copenhagen, you cannot solve three months later," said Danish foreign minister Per Stig Moeller. "If you do not do it in December, you do not do in March." Poland's leftist government is vulnerable to charges from rightist populists that it has sold out to Brussels cheaply and feels it must be seen to fight for good EU entry terms. - Reuters