Poland Reaches Agreement With EU on Borders
July 31, 2002
In a major breakthrough for its chances of becoming one of the next members of the European Union, Poland and Brussels have reached an agreement on one of the touchiest issues between the two entities: how to protect Poland's external borders.
"This session was a major step toward our goal of agreeing on non-financial matters by the end of September," said Poul Skytte Christoffersen, Denmark's ambassador to the European Union. As rotating president of the EU, Denmark led the Brussels meeting with accession states including Poland and nine others.
On Tuesday, Poland agreed to increase its number of border guards from 5,300 to 18,000 within the next four years. In addition, Poland said it would build dozens of new border crossing stations and buy new equipment, including helicopters and infrared detection devices, in order to increase its chances of becoming one of the first new EU member states in 2004.
Western European governments have long worried that some 1,260 kilometers (790 miles) of Poland's eastern border could become an EU gateway for illegal immigration, drugs and arms smuggling and prostitution once it becomes part of the union. For that reason, they have called for tighter border controls for Poland's eastern neighbors -- including Russia, Latvia, Belarus and the Ukraine.
Second-class EU citizens?
Polish fears of becoming "second class" European citizens may have been reinforced this week by the announcement of Eneko Landaburu, the European Commission's Director-General for Enlargement, that controls at the German-Polish border would be maintained for several years after membership.
"Passports will be needed for controls," Landaburu said. "There will be no change before [the new members join] the Schengen group." Signatories of the 1995 Schengen Agreement, including all EU members except Britain and Ireland, abandoned internal border controls while increasing their joint efforts to seal external borders.
Other factors have also made Polish membership less certain in recent years. In the early 1990s Poland had been one of the top candidates, but then recession hit the country and unemployment levels soared to close to 20 percent.
While Poland's political elite is still keen to promote the country as a viable EU partner, they find it increasingly more difficult to convince the 38.6 million Poles of membership's benefits. A recent poll showed that only a slim 51-percent majority of Polish people support EU membership.
The country's farmers fear they will be the first among the losers in the new partnership with the EU, since the current members have announced they want to limit agricultural subsidies to new states during their first decade of membership.
Apart from bringing Poland one step closer to the EU, the latest round of negotiations in Brussels also brought breakthrough deals for Estonia and Hungary, according to Denmark's Christoffersen.
Christoffersen said he believed the accession talks with the eastern European countries could be completed prior to an EU summit in December that will determine which of the 10 accession states get to join starting in 2004.