Friday 2005 June 03
EU MEMBERSHIP: "NON" to 2007, "NEE" to 2008, "DA"
to 2012?
Immediately before the recent "no" votes in France and now, more definitively, in Holland, I drove to Turkey to watch Liverpool win the Champions League, immediately followed by a weekend in Prague to attend a friend"s wedding.
After driving on the potholed "national" road to
Giurgiu we arrived at the multi-stop Romanian-Bulgarian frontier. Here I learnt
that a "local" tax has to be paid to the town of Giurgiu in order to cross into
Bulgaria even if I"ve never actually even seen the place. The Bulgarians" fees
included a disinfection fee charged for the privilege of driving through some
muddy water.
After five separate checks of our passports we made
it into Bulgaria, which to the untrained eye is very similar to Romania save for
many of the new houses in the villages being unfinished red brick constructions
rather than unpainted "tencuiala" style more favoured by the
Romanians.
We drove through the middle of Bulgaria and so did
not see Sofia. We did pass through three good sized towns that followed the
Romanian format of a small attractive centre surrounded by miles of concrete
apartment blocks and factories or something similar, just without the small
attractive centre.
The roads were perfectly drivable, as most national
roads in Romania are but what was marked as a motorway varied between a wide
piece of four-lane tarmac with no road markings, down to three and then two
lanes running through villages. They passed the "not-many-holes-to-avoid" test
but safe to say most Western European drivers would be appalled by the quality
and lack of meaningful road signs in towns (another similarity with
Romania).
After avoiding the lengthy queue to enter Turkey by
being sent through the diplomatic section just because we had tickets to a
football match (as certified by a stamp in my passport unbelievably) we roared
to Istanbul along a 6-lane motorway until we reached the suburbs of the city
that was filled with constructions sites and general development. It was clear
from just looking out of the car window that the quality of the new villas and
apartment blocks was impressive.
Istanbul was vibrant but less chaotic than
Bucharest with an international feel befitting its history. The blend of
sophistication with Byzantine disorder is probably a not unrealistic target for
Bucharest in the medium term.
What is clearly unrealistic is to imagine Bucharest
reaching the level of Prague or Romania reaching the level of Czech Republic any
time soon. Landing at the ultra clean, ultra modern Prague airport two days
later was the first surprise. Far superior to any airport we have in the UK and
two or three times the size of Henri Coanda. The place worked like clockwork.
The drive into Prague was along a new motorway and along suburban streets of
wholly finished houses with well kept gardens with not a stray dog, field of
rubbish or horse and cart to be seen.
Clearly it is unfair to compare Bucharest and
Prague architecturally, but the quality of the city in relation to the roads,
trams, tidiness, shops, cafes and restaurants makes a mockery of the idea that
Romania joining the EU three years after the Czech Republic is an indication
that they will be joining at anything close to the same level.
It isn"t just Prague; Warsaw, Lubjana, Bratislava,
Tallin, Riga, Budapest etc. are all operating at a completely different level to
Bucharest. The issue here isn"t to slate the slow development of Romania but to
put its, and Bulgaria"s, relative position vis-a-vis the CEE countries into
perspective with the "Old Europe" view of the 2004 wave of enlargement and the
proposed 2007 Romania-Bulgaria wave.
Both the French and the Dutch rejected the
constitution for a number of reasons, but it would appear that EU expansion
dilution of the social welfare model for Europe was important in France and the
cost of EU expansion was key in Holland (the biggest per head contributor to the
EU).
In the richer of the current EU members there is
grumbling about both the cost of expansion and the impact of cheap labour from
the East and a move of western businesses to the more competitive low cost
markets of Central Europe. These concerns are based on current members such as
Poland and Slovakia. The soon to be doomed EU Constitution will be a catalyst
for a complete re-think by current EU members, not just concerning the
constitution but the direction of the group.
Yesterday the main German opposition party (CDU)
announced that it was against Romania joining the EU within the current proposed
timeframe. The CDU is very likely to be in power later this year. As current EU
members look at where the future will take them, one of the first things they
will see ahead of them is the proposed membership of Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia
and Turkey.
This will automatically lead to a more detailed
look at Romania and this in turn to a better understanding of where the country
stands economically and politically, rather than just how much progress it has
made ticking off the various chapters the EU Commission requires of each country
before it joins.
The gulf that exists between the "old" and "new" EU
members is considered by the likes of the French, Dutch, British and Germans to
be significant. When EU member states look more closely at Romania from an
economic rather than just political perspective, the gulf will look like a chasm
and the negative implications of early membership for Romania and Bulgaria will
be clear.
The French and Dutch people have sent a message
that their and other governments cannot overlook the views of the man on the
street when planning the next stage of the EU project. This will lead to a more
cautionary EU strategy on the one side as well as some populist easily
understood decisions on the other.
An easy and popular move would be to defer
membership of countries such as Romania and Bulgaria on economic grounds to slow
the drain of money from West to East. As well as being easy and popular this
would also be the correct decision as it would be one based on economics rather
than politics, which has been the driving force behind Romania"s road to the EU
so far.
Politics will of course raise its head when it is
ultimately decided what to do with Romania, which will probably mean only a
year"s postponement until 2008. If the politicians actually look at Romania for
what it is, namely a finally growing country with an awful lot of growing up to
do, they will defer membership until 2010 or 2012.
Author: Oliver Meister
(by Ziarul Financiar)
© 1999 - 2005 mkco.ro
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