6. Strategies for Central and Eastern European states

In previous enlargements, the Commission had declared itself willing to 'understand' the particular problems of Acceding States. Provided they did not ask for things that involved changing treaties, which takes much time and altogether too much trouble, the Commission was willing to use a range of dodges and devices to find individual solutions: temporary exceptions and adjustment periods; derogations and transitions; perhaps add a new Objective, as with the last enlargement that brought in Finland, Sweden and Austria. Agenda 2000 professes to extend a similar welcome, but with rather more (though unstated) reserve. CEECs, both the five given the official nod of approval and the five who were not, have come to appreciate they need to box clever. But how to do just that? The Commission characteristically says, in SAPARD and elsewhere, "given your present position and existing plans, formulate a strategy to apply for the first few years". But what strategies will, if not 'win', then at least not 'lose'? More positively, given the available time and the circumstances at home and abroad, how to make the most of what is possible?

In pondering such questions, CEECs need to bear some general considerations. Different parties may be operating to different time horizons: CEECs may be thinking long-term; the Commission, especially in negotiations, may be thinking short-term; while Member States may be looking to the next reform of the CAP and the Structural Funds. There may be unequal terms, or at least unequal positions: CEECs must accept all the acquis all at once, whereas Member States have been able to do so over time and after their own fashion. That is the privilege of being an insider: you have a say not just in setting the rules, but also in determining what counts as following them. Reconciling the views of outsiders looking in on the EU and insiders looking out may be more difficult than either is willing to acknowledge. Whether or not the world each inhabits is truly different, it does seem that way, and this impression is not likely to fade in the time it will take to implement Agenda 2000.

As a particular case of how things may work, consider veterinary border controls. They are important to the Commission, the more so nowadays given British BSE and Belgian dioxins, but will be very costly for CEECs to set up and not cheap nor easy to maintain. They do not contribute directly to economic growth in CEECs and take up resources - both funds and people - that could be invested in activities and areas that would produce growth⁸. Besides, how they work, or fail to work, may provide Member States with convenient excuses to exclude or delay meat products from CEECs access to their domestic markets, and so preserve their advantage or avoid change in their own practices, to the disadvantage and possibly at the expense of CEECs.

Perhaps the primary task facing CEECs is to find out how to make best use of the resources and assistance that will be available in the accession period, and to avoid using them to do things that will not be required or useful after 2006. Knowing what you want is a necessary (though probably not sufficient) condition of a strong negotiating position. Having to ask 'how can I fill in all the details correctly? Please tell me what to do' does not augur well.

Strategies devised under SAPARD must be compatible with the acquis, but this still leaves room for manoeuvre. You can accept all provisions, but actually use only those that fit your strategy and help attain your objectives. Measures and means of implementation can be accepted in principle without thereby committing yourself to use them. Where there are difficulties, you need not challenge the validity of principles; rather, explain why you have practical problems at this time with a particular principle you do not like, and so need to negotiate assistance in applying it at present.

The implementation of other EU policies and frameworks have had different outcomes in different Member States of the EU. It would be handy to know what accounts for these differences, and so it is useful to go looking for explanations in institutions, attitude and interpretation, implementation and organisation.

But these could prove hard to find, in the short run at least, and time is at premium. Given this, an appropriate principle to adopt as a rule of thumb is that there is no universal strategy to follow in planning the implementation of Agenda 2000. Acceding States should therefore devise their own plans according to their own aspirations, needs and priorities, as best they can under their circumstances. The Commission expect this of them as it does of existing Members. The same goes for negotiating accession generally: each Acceding state should follow its own way in the preparatory period. SAPARD is oriented towards agriculture or close to agriculture, but it can be used as a means to achieve some real rural development goals. Rural development means different things at different levels. SAPARD will not solve all problems, but can be used to support national interests. It can be used in developing a strategy, though it does not provide much money to implement it.

However, confining plans to the limits of pre-accession programmes such as SAPARD is a mistake. It is necessary to think beyond their budgetary constraints and time horizons. The Polish government paper Coherent Structural Policy for Agricultural and Rural Development (1999; in English, Aug.99), which is a more detailed exposition of a previous document Medium-term Development Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Areas (April 1998), sets out to do this. Partnerships are useful in thinking more broadly in this way, for they can provide examples of how integrated rural development schemes can be implemented other than via direct subsidies, and can serve wider purposes, such as shaping administrative structures that can help overcome centrist legacies and build local and regional capacity over the long term.

Of direct practical value is to collect detailed information about administrative systems in Member States by talking directly to people who devise and operate them. Detailed acquaintance with how actual partnerships work in different Member States, what has worked and what has not, what has gone wrong and how it was set right, can go some way to compensate for lack of direct experience and so build confidence, both in dealing with other government departments at home and with the Commission. It can also provide an introduction to some of the dark arts of EU infighting: how and when to compromise without losing sight of the original objectives or sense of ultimate purpose; how to distinguish what you want from what you can get in ways that enable you better to disguise the available for the ideal.

Like Member States, each Acceding state has its unique individual problems; they also have problems common to them that Member States do not share. Restitution of property expropriated by the state after World War II is one, what to do about foreign ownership after the constitutional changes since 1989 is another. CEECs generally would benefit from better co-operation among themselves. They can learn from one another by sharing experience, can apply the lessons through twinning with Member States, as mooted by Greece and Bulgaria. Alliances between Acceding States would promote cross-border regional co-operation and might well strengthen their collective position with regard to the Commission. Maybe this report will encourage such efforts.

Alternative strategic considerations: agriculture versus rural development
It is important to distinguish between investment programmes, designed to yield a continuing flow of benefits into the future, and subsidised projects, which only get going because of the subsidy and keep going only as long as it lasts. Whatever else it might mean, sustainability entails 'not dependent on subsidy'.

One general strategy would be to seek small improvements on all fronts, rather than favouring some to the neglect of others in the hope of greater gains. The rationale for this could appeal to economic principle: given their current state of 'underdevelopment', CEECs are operating on the steep part of the marginal return curve, so a small change in input gives a large change in output. Or it could appeal to pragmatic considerations: there is not enough evidence and too much uncertainty to pick winners or avoid losers with any confidence, so it is better to hedge your bets.

An alternative argument is that given the way things are going within the EU and internationally it might well be strategically prudent to seek a good deal on rural development, via negotiating rights to the Structural Funds, rather than on agricultural policy, via price support, on the expectation (or guess, but not just hope) that the former are likely to last and perhaps grow, while the latter is under pressure and is likely to decrease. Thus Hungary might agree to forego agricultural compensation payments in return for more support for rural development measures. It might not then seek to be an Objective I state, nor to negotiate a new Objective as did Finland and Sweden on accession. In Hungary, by one calculation based on long-term regional plans, if out of 6 million ha agricultural cropland, 800 000 ha were to be forested and 500 000 ha become grassland, Hungary could double the funds available to it via Structural Funds and the Rural Development Regulation for rural development

In any event it is hard to say what the world price of agricultural commodities would be in the absence of state subsidies and regulations. Tariff negotiations under the WTO have not, or not yet, made such calculations easier .Therefore it is also hard to say what agricultural practices are or will be competitive. Besides, the Commission may calculate the benefits of a deal not just in terms of lower subsidy payments but also in surpluses avoided by not making compensation payments. The latter may lead to less trouble with quotas, placate WTO and have social and other indirect benefits associated with it.

In most CEECs, big farmers are ostensibly the more efficient ones, but they will suffer most competitive disadvantage from unfavourable agricultural terms. In Poland calculations suggest that if they receive no compensatory payments then they will be unable to compete with farmers from the rest of the EU and will 'die'.

But if Acceding States do not receive compensatory payments, quota allocations, and are not covered by other aspects of the CAP, why should they agree to contribute the same proportion of their VAT receipts to the budget as existing Member States? If there were to be no 'common market' in agriculture and they were to end up anything like net contributors, why bother seeking membership at all?

It is worth noting in this connection that in accession referenda held in Finland and Sweden, farmers there voted 90% against membership. This may well have been because they received a higher level of support from the national government than they would get from the EU. In a CEEC such as Estonia, by contrast, the balance of support is the other way round.

In Romania, where 37% of the population is still engaged in agriculture in some form or other, the government has chosen to allocate more resources to rural development than to agriculture. In part this was done out of necessity because of the threat of trouble in rural areas from ex-miners without alternative employment. But for many years in the past, agriculture supported industry. Nowadays farmers may get limited assistance, such as vouchers for seeds, but they do not receive agricultural production subsidies. There is some government support for marketing and processing, but not for producing. As a legacy from old collective farms, there are associations of producers but these are not expected to last much longer. Given all this there is wondering in some corners of the Ministry of Agriculture about why more complaint has not been heard and indeed about how they are surviving at all.

The position of Estonian farmers bears comparison. One report likened their recent history to a research project to breed a horse that does not need feed. The project was going well and nearly succeeded, but then the horse died.

Acceding States accordingly need to distinguish between two issues: (i) whether by negotiation you can get compensation payments, or some version of them, on agreeable terms; and (ii) what to go for, and what to sacrifice in order to get more of something else, such as support for rural development policy. A relevant strategic consideration would be to analyse the argument that if rural development schemes could be made to work, (ex-) farmers and their families would get jobs on the rural labour market. A viable strategy might be to solve the problem of too many 'inefficient' farmers via that market, rather than the agricultural market, with the bonus that farmers or farm families keep their land and remain in rural areas.

Conclusion
Flexibility is in the interests of all Member States but especially of the Commission. The Commission likes to have room to manoeuvre and will make it for itself if it cannot readily be found. That is one reason why the theory of the EU and of the Commission (as set out in the aquis) tends on occasion not to rule practice, or anyway not too closely. Member States know this, indeed take it for granted; Acceding States need to get used to it, and learn to take advantage of it.

Their schooling in this subject may profit from the example of the UK, which was (so it claimed) not native to the culture of 'Europe' either. Its proclivity to high-flown expressions of surprise if not dismay at the suggestion that it is possible to distinguish between a principle construed as fixed and absolute, to be observed to the letter, and the same principle construed as the starting point for negotiation, took up valuable learning time. This could have been put to more productive use, as the earthier approach of Ireland, who acceded at the same time as the UK, perhaps shows.

Besides, the EU responds to pressure when applied appropriately and so is constantly evolving. It does not have an essence that is unchanging amid the flux of events, but rather is just a creature of time and circumstance, an aggregate of responses to issues and occasions. Eastern enlargement is for the EU, more especially for the Commission, a continuation of a familiar process, albeit on a larger scale - rather than the one-off event, unprecedented and never to be repeated, that CEECs may reasonably, given their singular history, conceive it to be.

CEECs should think about what they want and how to get there, not just via SAPARD but by their own traditions and national plans. They should accommodate the EU and its instruments to their own needs, priorities, means and methods, rather than the other way round. There are good pragmatic grounds for doing this: being obsequious as a way of courting sympathy may not help and could hinder by getting yourself taken for granted. By the same token, though trouble makers tend to get more attention than those who suffer in silence, those who propose possible solutions rather than just complain get more still. There are also good grounds of principle. The EU is not hegemenous, at any rate not in the way COMECON was; there is some substance to the claim that national sovereignty has not been ceded, just pooled in some areas to some degree, and some commitment to the old slogan 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need' - though it may not always look, or feel, like it. Greater co-operation between the Accession States could improve their ability to ensure that their different needs are more fully recognised and taken into account by the EU during and after the negotiating process.

8. This is not to deny that veterinary controls are not important for veterinary reasons, such as the control of such diseases as swine fever and foot and mouth disease.