European Union foreign ministers meet tomorrow, to seek progress on the reforms necessary to prepare the bloc for eastward expansion. The special meeting signals a determination by current EU President, France, to find acceptable changes to the European Union treaty for streamlining the decision-making structure before allowing new members to join.
The political and economic union of 15 nations must meet a deadline to agree the changes at a December summit in Nice, if it is to honour a pledge to be ready to open its doors for up to 12 new members by January 1, 2003. Once a deal on treaty reforms has been struck, the EU will need two years to ratify any treaty changes. For their part, candidate countries seeking entrance must have completed difficult economic and political preparations by the January 1, 2003 deadline to be admitted.
Since they were launched in February, the inter-governmental talks have registered little progress, with EU countries keeping cards close to their chest, ahead of what is expected to be a frantic period of diplomacy in the autumn. Diplomats said little concrete progress was expected at Monday's meeting, which will focus on an idea called "reinforced co-operation", which would allow some EU members to go ahead with deeper integration without waiting for members who are reluctant to make even closer ties at the moment.
French President, Jacques Chirac, fuelled the debate over closer political and economic ties in the union, when he recently suggested in a speech in Berlin that France and Germany could lead deeper EU integration among a core of member states. Chirac's speech followed an even more controversial blueprint by German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, for a federal Europe presented in May. The ideas have prompted fears in some EU and candidate countries that a "two-speed" Europe could emerge in which they would be second-class members.
Candidate countries also fear that failure to agree on the reforms could set back their entry date. They are also expressing increasing concerns that the EU is dragging its feet in the expansion talks themselves. EU member governments have been cold to demands by the candidate countries to set a target date for ending EU expansion negotiations at the December summit.
The size of the European Commission, the EU's executive council, will also be discussed at the meeting, as well as how to extend majority voting in the EU, and how to redistribute voting in the group's decision-making Council of Ministers. The 12 EU candidate countries for the European Union are Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Malta, Estonia.
