The long hello
Louisa Vinton is a senior editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit. She was previously an analyst of Polish politics at Radio Free Europe.
Poland's referendum on European Union membership is cause for celebration. The voting itself is not so important - although it's clear that a resounding majority of voters who choose to participate will endorse accession. Nor is turnout an insurmountable hurdle. Polish elections have caused much hand-wringing in the past, yet the results have generally defied the dire predictions of pessimistic poll watchers. And even if voter participation falls short of the ambitious 50% threshold that the referendum rules set for validity, Poland's nervous politicians have a fallback: the parliament will approve the treaty.
The salient fact is that, whatever the outcome, EU membership is a done deal. It's hard to imagine a circumstance that could call into question Poland's accession on May 1, 2004.
This achievement has been a long time in the making. Although formal membership talks opened only in 1998, Poland has been lobbying for admission to the EU for well over a decade. Indeed, so much time has passed that it's easy to forget that EU membership was once batted about as a geopolitically correct way for the former communist countries to achieve the aim of European integration, while avoiding the distress to Russia that NATO enlargement was thought certain to cause. Yet the glacial pace of EU talks has meant that Poland will have entered the military alliance a full five years ahead of joining the EU.
Throughout this arduous decade of ambitious structural reform, legal adjustment and assiduous diplomacy, the quest for EU membership has been spared the very public and often embarrassing infighting to which Polish politicians have subjected virtually every other issue. Regardless of their ideological leanings, successive governments have hewn to a consistent line. What's more, the parade of Polish foreign ministers since 1989 has tended to embody the very best of Polish statesmanship - as if the country's international reputation were something too valuable to risk entrusting to politicians of a normal ilk. This combination of resolve and skill has helped to limit voices critical of the campaign for EU membership to a cabaret fringe populated by Samoobrona and Radio Maryja.
It has helped, of course, that most Poles embrace EU membership as a symbolic end to the artificial divisions of the Cold War and an act that restores the country to its rightful place in the heart of Europe. It is, as Pope John Paul II has said, a reflection of "historical justice." In this sense, EU accession is a triumphant culmination of an arduous quest.
But for all its symbolic satisfactions, EU entry is as much a beginning as an end, a new challenge to be shouldered as much as a triumph to be savored. Granted, the accession process has already delivered many of the benefits associated with EU membership: borders are open to trade, foreign investment has arrived, restructuring aid has begun to flow, the acquis communautaire has been transposed. What's more, May 1, 2004 brings with it no "big bang." Nothing significant will change from one day to the next.
As past enlargements have shown, however, EU membership is no guarantee of improved economic fortunes, even with all the benefits of massive financial aid. A comparison of the experience of Ireland, which joined in 1973, and of Greece, which entered in 1981, reveals an instructive divergence. From similar starting points, Ireland has managed not only to catch up to average EU living standards but to surpass them: its GDP per head rose from barely 70% of the EU average to 121% in 2002. Greece's GDP per head, by contrast, was still just 70% of the average in 2002, barely higher than when it joined.
What explains the difference? Sound macroeconomic policy and the continued pursuit of structural reforms are the keys to catch-up growth rates; channeling EU subsidies to consumption rather than investment is a recipe for marching in place. This is what distinguishes the Irish economic wonder from Greece's relative stagnation. In fact, an analysis conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit for a forthcoming report on enlargement shows that sound policy-making has the potential to halve the time it will take for accession countries to overtake the EU-15's average GDP per head.
This is an important lesson for Poland, which will mark its debut as an EU member with a GDP per head that is roughly 40% of the EU average. With far more ground to make up than even Greece, Poland cannot simply sit back, collect its subsidies and wait for the benefits of membership to accrue. Even under what the EIU defines as a "benign" scenario, which assumes continued EU liberalization as well as sound economic management and structural reform on Poland's part, it will take 59 years for the country to catch up to the average income level of the EU's current 15 members.
Having achieved EU membership, the temptation for Polish policy makers will be to abandon efforts even to stumble ahead with politically difficult reforms. Yet this is precisely the reverse of what is needed. EU membership is an opportunity that can easily be wasted; to fail to seize it would be a betrayal of hard-earned "historical justice."
