Viewpoint: EU enlargement woes

The queue for EU membership keeps getting longer. The 27-nation EU has accepted Turkey, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Serbia and other Balkan countries as potential candidates. Recession-battered Iceland may follow.

Former Soviet countries such as Ukraine and Georgia have been told that they need to improve a lot before the EU will consider them as candidates.

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of eastward enlargement, the EU's Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn released a report in February that explained how both the new members and the "old" EU have gained from integrating with each other.

Thanks to enlargement the EU is now the single biggest market in the world, and certainly a force to be reckoned with in the forthcoming G20 talks about how to fix the world economy.

Eastern progress

Over the last decade, the nimble, fast-growing East European countries also added a degree of dynamism to an EU economy that looked sluggish and sclerotic at the time.

The biggest winners have been the new members themselves.

Nothing quite focuses politicians' minds like the goal of joining the EU. The bloc is demanding: applicants have to open up their economies, tackle political favouritism and corruption, and adopt the EU's accumulated legal rules. In return, they can expect booming trade with the EU's 13 trillion-euro single market and large amounts of foreign investment.

Since 1973, when the UK joined what was then known as the European Community, the EU has welcomed new members on average every eight years.

Most recently, Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007. They had missed the "big bang" enlargement of 2004 when 10 - mostly ex-communist - countries had joined the club.

Stumbling blocks

But even the candidate countries are stuck at the moment.

There are well-known reasons why enlargement is now proceeding slowly. Many of the current applicants are poor and backward; some, such as Bosnia, have yet to build a functioning state; Kosovo has not even been recognised by all current EU countries.

Turkey poses special issues. Because of its 70 million population, proud politicians and predominantly Muslim religion, many people in Austria, France, Germany and elsewhere question whether it should join the EU at all.

Moreover, many people in the EU are still struggling to digest the impact of the last enlargement.

Fears that eastward enlargement would lead to political gridlock and economic hardship have not materialised.

Nevertheless, the current EU-wide recession has aggravated concerns that taking in more countries would bring more low-cost competition at a time when jobless queues are getting longer everywhere.

The economic instability seen in some of the new eastern member countries, such as Latvia and Hungary, now will make voters in the West even warier of further enlargement.

At a recent meeting of foreign ministers, Germany and the Netherlands effectively blocked the application of Montenegro, a Mediterranean country of 620,000. If Montenegro made progress, they may have reasoned, Albania, Bosnia and Serbia would hand in their official applications this year as well, thus putting pressure on the EU to act.

Even before the foreign ministers' meeting, there were signs of trouble.

Bilateral disputes

Various existing EU members have been holding the enlargement process hostage to bilateral spats they are having with some applicant or other. EU governments have always thrown their specific worries or pet projects into accession negotiations. What is new is the boldness with which some now hold up the entire process, to get what they want.

The most blatant example is Slovenia's dispute with Croatia over a stretch of Mediterranean coastline.

Croatia was hoping to wrap up its accession negotiations this year so that it can join in 2010. But while 26 EU countries (and the European Commission) wanted to open 10 new "chapters" in the negotiations in 2008, Slovenia vetoed all but one.

Since then, the political atmosphere between Ljubljana and Zagreb has become so poisonous that the EU has called in Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Martti Ahtisaari to find a way out.

Greece is holding Macedonia's application hostage to its long-running dispute over the country's proper name.

Cyprus is blocking several chapters in Turkey's accession talks, probably in the hope of gaining leverage in the peace talks on the divided island. France is also holding up the talks, but for more profound reasons: since President Nicolas Sarkozy prefers a "privileged partnership", he argues that Turkey need not bother with those chapters of the acquis - the EU rulebook - that are only relevant for full members.

These small-minded vetoes are dangerous. The East European and Balkan region has been hit hard by the economic crisis. These countries would find it a lot easier to get through the crisis if they had the prospect of EU membership to guide them.

EU governments need some vision here. They should conclude a "gentlemen's agreement" about not vetoing accessions because of bilateral grievances. They need to find a way of keeping Turkey's accession process alive, even if no breakthrough is achieved in Cyprus this year. And they should allow the applications of the Balkan countries to proceed.

The alternative could be a region full of political instability, economic turmoil and disgruntled people dreaming.