What a difference a day makes

By the time you read this, the official European Union entry date for Poland and the rest will have been fixed, and it will be either, wait for it, April Fool's Day or May Day 2004.
A decision is being made today and, barring a last-minute change of heart, the outcome will be a headline writer's dream. Personally, I would prefer April 1, but I'll stake the reputation of my finest well-placed sources and predict that it will be May 1.

"Have you considered the public relations implications of these options?" a BBC correspondent asked one of the negotiators in Brussels last Friday, when the two hot-favourite date choices were revealed.
There were shrugs and grins, as it seems nobody had thought about the date. A third option was Schuman Day, which falls on May 9 and commemorates the 1950 declaration, which paved the way for the modern EU. (Schuman was Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister who started this whole Euro show going).
But someone with a tidy mind has decided that enlargement must officially begin on the first of a month, and as nobody can quite guarantee to complete the necessary ratification formalities by January 1, 2004, another month must be chosen.
Yes, but April Fool's Day? Or May Day, the international call sign of those in distress? You couldn't make it up, and on such glorious trivia is the boundless joy of the EU composed.
The date will be confirmed at a meeting in Brussels of all 25 foreign ministers - those from the current 15 member states and those from what is known in EU jargon as the "Laeken Ten" (because Laeken is the place just outside Brussels where the EU leaders decided 10 countries could join this time round: please concentrate on these details. They are taken very seriously in Brussels).

It will be a tense meeting, mostly because everybody will have to squeeze together to make enough room, and speaking time will be strictly limited to ensure everyone has his say before the cleaning ladies go home.
The foreign ministers will be given no more than five minutes each in which to address their colleagues, but at least that is more than the MPs from Poland and the rest of the "Laeken Ten" will get when they join Euro-MPs in Strasbourg.
That will be a tense meeting, too, because everyone will have to squeeze together to make room, and they will get only three minutes of speaking time.
But both these meetings offer a taste of things to come and will act as a gentle reminder to those with, shall we say, more expansive political debating styles, that official speaking time in the EU, where freedom of speech is paramount, is governed strictly by the stopwatch.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the final negotiations gather momentum, and the stakes are getting higher.
Basically, Poland and the others after three sorts of membership concessions, best summed it up as: money, things that cost money and things that appear not to cost money directly.
Money simply means more cheques payable to the candidates to make them better off from April Fool's Day or May Day 2004.

Things that cost money means larger farm quotas. Things that don't cost money directly means granting licences to Latvia to carry on shooting lynxes and bears and to Estonia to fish for an especially small Baltic herring, which would normally escape through the holes of nets meeting Common Fisheries Policy standards.
You may laugh, as indeed do we all, but this is what the EU is really all about: when the Swedes joined, they insisted on being allowed to carry on producing some pretty noxious chewing tobacco, which doesn't conform to any known EU norms, while the Danes wanted to continue banning Germans from snapping up cheap holiday homes along the Danish coast. These arrangements are called "opt outs." The UK has an especially ancient one, which makes it the only country in the EU still permitted to import New Zealand lamb.
They all got their way, and no doubt the "Laeken Ten" will get their way too, before the historic date of May Day (or April Fool's Day) 2004.
May Day, of course, commemorates the workers' struggle for a better deal, and notably a maximum eight-hour working day.
Not for EU ministers: there is a marathon days-and-nights negotiating session on fishing policy coming up in December, and veterans of such encounters say it will run for five days and nights.
Funny enough, ministers from the "Laeken Ten" have not volunteered to sit in on that one, but their turn looms ever closer.