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Date Posted: 08:01:19 05/20/02 Mon
Author: The Nonsense of NATO Expansion
Subject: Nikolai von Kreitor

May 20, 2002
Eastward expansion makes nonsense of Commission dogma
ROGER BOYES EUROPEAN BRIEFING


ROMANO PRODI, Il Professore, is a master of ill timing. This week he will set out plans for a new Europe in which his European Commission hopes to expand its role in defence, foreign and home affairs; a two-speed Europe allowing the fast integrators to run the show and the others to tag along as best they can. The inevitable controversy about the proposals, to be presented to Giscard d’Estaing’s convention on the constitutional future of Europe, will expose the usual fault lines across the Continent. Yet this is the week that President Bush is seeking to redefine the West’s relationship to Russia and his visit, to Germany at least, will give vent to months of stored-up anti-American sentiment. Should not Professor Prodi be concentrating on Russia, or on the troubled US-European relationship? His priorities are wrong and it is hardly surprising that Brussels does not figure in the Bush tour. The eastward expansion of Nato — the backdrop to the Bush visit — and of the European Union is already laying bare the intellectual poverty in Brussels. Every aspect of the EU entry negotiations flushes out inconsistencies and makes a nonsense of the dogma upheld by the high priests of the Commission’s bureaucracy. Take nuclear power. At least seven EU candidates use atomic energy. Austria has been trying to restrict or even close down a nuclear plant at Temelin across the border in the Czech Republic. Most Western countries are worried about Bulgaria’s Kozluduy; the Commission is pushing for a closedown by 2006. Ignalina in Lithuania uses two RBMK 1,500 Chernobyl-style reactors that provide Lithuania with 70 per cent of its electricity. A shutdown, as a condition of EU entry, would bring disaster. Loyola de Palacio, the EU Energy Commissioner, is by no means hostile to nuclear power. She believes, though, that there should be a common European policy on nuclear safety. The Central and East Europeans broadly agree, if that is the price for keeping some of their plants open. The Environment Ministry, in the hands of the Greens, senses a plot by Brussels to delay Germany’s planned abandonment of atomic energy. So what price a two-speed Europe? The second-class members, the poor cousins from out east, could become the driving force of integration. Commission thinking does not really tackle the question of who will set the pace of integration in a bigger Europe. Kiev’s grievance NEW metaphors have to be found to describe the changes on the Continent. Professor Prodi’s weakness is not that he identifies the expansion of the power of the Commission with the expansion of Europe; that is wrong-headed but it is after all his job to maximise the authority of Brussels. No, his mistake is that he has become a prisoner of the bureaucracy and its collective memory which is frozen sometime in the 1970s. The Commission still thinks in terms of power blocs rather than the interplay of nations and cultures. Last week Leonid Kuchma, the President of Ukraine, came to Brussels complaining that Kiev was being left out of the new relationship shaping up between the EU and Russia. He was advised to draw closer to Russia since if there is to be a “common economic space”, a privileged trading area, then it would be built on the basis of the Commonwealth of Independent States. President Kuchma met the Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on Friday to talk it over. But really he needs no prompting to lean towards Russia; the question is whether the European Commission should be in the business of encouraging the restoration of the former Soviet Union. Poles torn apart THE Polish port of Szczecin is an hour’s fast drive from Berlin and it is a fairly regular destination for those of us frustrated by Germany’s shopping hours. The city has been booming and its privatised shipyards were among the most efficient on the Baltic. Now the recession is biting. The shipyards stopped producing two months ago; a strong zloty, erratic management and a failure of banking confidence have swung the mood of the city against the EU and Western capital. Only a passionate speech by a Solidarity veteran dissuaded shipyard workers from storming supermarkets owned by Western chains. The Polish Government is considering state aid to keep the yards going, and the European Commission is already expressing concern. It is not just the 7,500 shipyard workers and the tens of thousands of suppliers who are restless. Every housewife can now buy heavily subsidised milk from the EU in their shops for less money than unsubsidised Polish milk; the whole farming structure of the region is collapsing. There is still a majority of Poles in favour of EU membership but there are now several parts of the country where hostility to Brussels is spilling over. This was not supposed to be the point of enlargement, the historic fusion of a continent that has been split by war and competing ideologies. Brussels was ready to fudge to achieve the greatest possible membership of the European Monetary Union. It should fudge again to bring in the Easterners as quickly as possible; delay is beginning to destabilise the East.

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