Brussels diary

Enlargement gaffe
October 19, 2000

Dirty work on enlargement

Brussels after the long summer break can feel uncannily like that first day back at school-high spirits holding gloom at bay-so it was a shame for the European commission that la rentr?e was quickly marred by yet another embarrassment over a central policy question.

This time, though, it wasn't the usual suspect, the hapless President Prodi himself, but the normally stolid G?nter Verheugen, the German commissioner for enlargement. G?nter pandered to his country's worst fears by calling for a referendum on the biggest question now facing the EU: enlargement.

Two biggish problems there: commissioners are supposed to represent the supranational commission, not express controversial concerns about public opinion back home; and the German constitution does not permit referenda, for well-known reasons.

It sounded bad-especially when Verheugen used the unlovely phrase dreckarbeit (dirty work) to describe what the commission had to do because member states were not willing to discuss this difficult issue with their own voters. But his remarks to the S?ddeutsche Zeitung highlights real problems. Front-runners such as Poland are increasingly nervous about the slipping deadline: they will be ready to join by 2003, but 2005 seems the first likely date. Viewed from Warsaw, Prague, or Tallinn, this is about reunifying Europe and making amends for Yalta while myopic Brussels bureaucrats pore over the small print of regulations about swine fever and competition policy.

Yet at the same time it does seem downright foolish to embark on another ambitious project with only Europe's elites on board. With German and French doubts publicly mounting, Tony Blair's advisers are now pushing enlargement as Britain's big theme-a laudable if familiar (and obviously euro-diversionary) tactic-even though support for it in the UK is a miserable 26 per cent, just below the EU average.

Whatever his motives, Verheugen's timing was excruciating: the very moment when the Prodi commission was hoping for some decent publicity-or at least a gaffe-free zone-around the time of its first anniversary in office. Last year, just before he took over from the discredited Jacques Santer, a rueful aide recalled, Prodi was housed temporarily in a building called La Joyeuse Entr?e, named after the road that runs along the end of Brussels' Cinquantenaire park. Never mind: maybe things will look up. An uncharacteristically stern public rebuke to Verheugen made it sound as if Prodi might finally be getting a bit of a grip on his team.

Culture of secrecy

It was scarcely noticed in the dog days of mid-August, but it was bad news for open government when member states nodded through rules allowing EU documents on military and related crisis-management subjects to be exempt from otherwise increasingly wide public access. Paperwork in this novel area is expanding, as big decisions loom in the defence brief overseen by Javier Solana, the charming Spanish secretary-general. But assorted Dutchmen, Scandinavians and other freedom of information buffs worry that Nato's culture of secrecy is creeping in through Europe's back door. Testy French diplomats, anxious for progress on one of their presidency's top priorities, hissed that such criticism was deeply unfair, because only a small proportion of sensitive material would be withheld under the new secrecy criteria. And it could have been worse, with the Germans demanding the witholding of documents on immigration and asylum, and never mind the public's right to know. Still, better watch out for that old soldiers' habit of classifying everything, including the toilet paper requirements, on the grounds that it could be useful to the enemy.

Euro-absurdities for all

Now that William Hague has decided to ring-fence areas of British sovereignty against the encroachments of "Brussels,'' perhaps he will throw some kind of cordon around his own Euro-MPs, who have been vigorously pursuing that ancient British tradition of euro-absurdity-spotting.

Their latest attempt to spin up a new plot by the servants of the federal superstate concerns a ban on sturdy, free-born, Anglo-Saxon ladders. But as in slapstick comedy, ladders have a nasty way of swinging round and smacking you in the face. This time the whack came when it was pointed out that the Tories themselves had backed these perfectly sensible measures (requiring ladders to be anchored) in health and safety regulations.

But the spirit behind these theatrical diversions is not entirely misplaced. Liberal Democrat MEP Nick Clegg, frustrated, like so many of Europe's ordinary citizens, by the yawning gap between vision and reality, expresses the same sentiment in pro-European form when he writes, in a new paper for the Centre for European Reform: ''There is something patently lopsided about an EU which can harmonise the length of buses or the time worked by junior doctors but is helpless to stop bloodshed in the Balkans or stem the growth in international drug-trafficking." The message-less is more. Or, as that pithy Herr Verheugen might have said: there's enough dreckarbeit for everyone, so the answer to those back-to-school blues is to try harder at the quality jobs. n