Some of the difficulties surrounding the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) of the European Union might not be resolved until the last hours of negotiation before the Nice summit in December, a leading European politician has said.
The speaker of the Austrian parliament, Dr Heinz Fischer, said a lot of hard work still had to be done and many problems remained unsolved. "Decision-making in the EU is different from the decision-making in a firm or agency."
Each country had to keep its national interest and the state of public opinion at home in mind. "Every prime minister or foreign minister knows that the success of a summit is also his success." The converse was true of failure.
Dr Fischer, who is also deputy chairman of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, was speaking in Trinity College, Dublin at the "summer university" of the Party of European Socialists, comprising Labour and Social Democratic parties from throughout the continent.
The IGC is a process of negotiation between the member-states mainly to prepare the institutions of the EU for enlargement, the issue which is likely to dominate the Nice Summit.
Dr Fischer said that although no official date had been set for the admission of new member-states, there was growing support for the idea that announcing a date would increase the pressure to complete the negotiations. "There are many countries at the moment who are not members of the EU who deserve to become members in the reasonably near future."
A Dutch MEP, Mr Jan Marinus Wiersma, said setting a date for EU membership was "very important for the candidate countries". Commenting on the requirements for membership, he said: "These are not negotiations, it's a diktat from the EU." The countries currently seeking membership were generally at a different level of economic development than other recent entrants such as Austria, Sweden and Finland.
On the Balkan conflict he said it was very important to use the model of European co-operation to improve the situation there. The EU should be used as an example to promote regional cohesion. While the situation in Kosovo was very complicated, there were positive developments in other Balkan countries such as Albania, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Mr Michael Dauderstaedt of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation said social democratic parties were not achieving the desired level of support in post-communist countries in central and eastern Europe. One of the reasons was that, even when they came to power they had no other option but to continue with the economic reforms of their predecessors.
Many people expected an immediate increase in prosperity from entering the EU but membership as such did not lead to economic progress. He pointed out that Ireland joined the EU in 1973 but "the famous Irish miracle" was a more recent phenomenon, Mr Dauderstaedt said.