There is something touchingly naive about Spanish Europhilia. The country will be having a referendum on the EU constitution on 20th February. To kick off the campaign on 9th January, officials placed a copy of the document on the seat of every spectator at the recent Madrid derby between Real and Atlético. One trembles at the very thought of trying a similar stunt at Liverpool-Everton or West Ham-Millwall. The constitution is, after all, quite a weighty document, which would make a potentially damaging missile. If large numbers of copies were set alight, they would be a fire hazard. And the risk of enraging an already emotional crowd with talk of the abolition of the rotating presidency and the establishment of legal personality for the union would be enormous. No such risk, it seems, among the pro-European Spaniards. Still, the Madrid fans did persist in their recently acquired habit of making monkey noises at black players - in this case, Roberto Carlos of Real was the target. If only they had taken the time to consult the document under their seats, they might have realised that this is in flagrant contradiction of article III-21 of the constitution's charter of fundamental rights.
Europhilia in Spain and Poland…
Opinion polls taken at the start of the campaign suggest that only 4 per cent of Spanish people intend to vote against the constitution. Contrast this with Britain, where the latest Mori poll showed a "no" vote of 55 per cent. The Spanish figure is all the more surprising when one recalls that just a year ago it was the Spanish and the Poles who were fighting hardest against the adoption of the new constitution, because its new voting procedures will seriously dilute their power to influence decisions. In the end, the Spanish gave way more or less completely after the election of the Zapatero government. But this concession appears to have had no impact on public opinion. This suggests that votes on the constitution will be determined by a general sense of whether people feel positive about "Europe," rather than the details of the document. In Spain, where the EU is associated with modernity, economic growth and democracy - and lashings of money from Brussels - most people are uncomplicatedly pro-EU. The same process may be getting under way in Poland - the other great holdout against the constitution, and a country which until recently had a strong Eurosceptic movement. Over the last year, the Polish economy has grown by around 5 per cent. In its first eight months of membership, Poland has received some 42.5bn of EU aid. Farm incomes, exports and tourism receipts are soaring, and the deficit is shrinking. All of this makes it much more likely that Poland too will vote in favour of the constitution when it holds its referendum in the autumn. And within five years, the Poles may be as unswervingly pro-European as the Spaniards.
…but not over regional aid
Their shared Europhilia, however, has not stopped Polish and Spanish officials from squabbling openly in Brussels about the distribution of the next EU budget, which will run from 2007-13. A deal on the budget is meant to be sorted out by the end of the Luxembourg presidency in June 2005, and one of the biggest issues will be the question of regional aid. The British and the Germans are both arguing that the EU's regional programmes should be diverted more or less in their entirety to the new member states in central Europe. This would help the cause of budget discipline, and it also seems fair enough considering that the big recipients under the current budget - Spain, above all, but also Portugal, Greece, Ireland and southern Italy - are all considerably richer than the new members. The argument is that Spain has done well out of the EU for a generation and that it is now time to pass on the baton. Funding new programmes in central Europe largely out of the regional aid budget would mean that Spain and other southern Europeans would be asked to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of enlargement, argue the Spaniards. These arguments have not gone down well in London and Berlin - and are even less appreciated in Warsaw. The bitterness of the Polish-Spanish row about money is doubtless exacerbated by an undercurrent of ill feeling left behind by Iraq. Spanish anti-Americanism is - if anything - even more passionate than that of the French.
Eyeing the British rebate
Any British self-righteousness towards Spain is complicated by the fact that our position on the British rebate is also widely regarded as indefensible. The view in Brussels is that the rebate might just have been justifiable in the 1980s, when Britain was still relatively poor and agricultural spending took up a larger share of the budget. But now that neither of these things are true, and a group of much poorer countries have joined, the rebate must go. The British point out that the UK is still a large net contributor, and would be the largest per capita were it not for the rebate. Sotto voce, British officials also argue that forcing Blair to give up the rebate a couple of months before the referendum on the constitution would be the final nail in the coffin of the pro-European cause. The results of the budget negotiation - and of the British referendum - may depend on whether this argument convinces other EU countries.
