Pressure increases on Ireland to vote Yes
Yesterday, the commissioner responsible for overseeing enlargement, Gunter Verhoygen, said: “The entire project is dead if a member state’s parliament fails to ratify the treaty.”
The other 14 member states have ratified the treaty, but the 74 million citizens in the 10 candidate countries must wait for Ireland’s ballot on Saturday week to know if they will be admitted.
The European Commission insists there is no alternative plan to allow enlargement to go ahead if Ireland votes No. Sources in the Danish presidency have admitted privately that
enlargement would be delayed for at best two years. But with some of the larger countries balking at the cost of admitting 10 poor countries, the expansion might never happen.
The commission report, revealed to the European Parliament in Brussels yesterday, gave the green light to admit Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
However they will be on probation for a number of years while shortfalls in their economies, governance and legal systems are ironed out and brought up to EU standards.
As expected, Bulgaria and Romania were told they must wait until 2007 to be admitted, while Turkey’s application was put on indefinite hold. Turkey was told while they made progress in areas of democracy and civil rights, some of the laws they introduced significantly limited fundamental rights and freedoms.
With the exception of Malta and Cyprus, the central and eastern European countries were under Communist control and have only become parliamentary democracies with market economies over the last decade.
While they will expand the 370 million population of the EU by more than 70 million, or 20%, they will add just 5% to the wealth. They have between 27% to 83% of the average GDP of the current 15 EU members.
EU leaders meet in Brussels at the end of this month and are expected to formally approve the commission’s list. The candidates will then be involved in final discussions at the summit meeting in Copenhagen in December.
There remain hurdles, mainly in funding, especially for agriculture, but it is expected these will not be cleared until the larger countries who are pushing for CAP reform come to an agreement.
