EU will be ‘very pragmatic’ with neighbours

EU should be more confident and self-interested in its relations with neighbours, European commissioner says.

The European Commission intends over the next five years to adopt a “very pragmatic approach” to would-be members of the European Union and to other countries in its neighbourhood, says Johannes Hahn, the European commissioner responsible for enlargement negotiations and neighbourhood policy.

Speaking on Friday (14 November), Hahn said he wanted to bring some of his experience from business and from his five years as commissioner for regional policy into his new role. He portrayed pragmatism as a new, more self-interested and assertive policy by the EU, both towards countries that hope to join the EU and others along the EU’s eastern and southern borders. “In the past, I had the impression that the European interest did not play a role,” he said. “We have to identify what are the European interests”, and “we have to be much more confident”.

The EU’s interests would be more fully reflected in the conditions set for EU financial support, he suggested. To date, “often conditionality [has been] formulated like a piece of literature”, Hahn said. “We have to identify conditions that are measurable.” Some of the conditions could be identified by asking “investors if they are interested in going into a particular country”, he said, adding that in his experience investors’ wish-lists were topped by the rule of law, running costs, the
ease of securing business licences, the availability of a skilled workforce and the quality of public administration.

Hahn was speaking at the start of a year-long review of the EU’s 16-country neighbourhood policy demanded by Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission. Juncker has ruled out further enlargement in the next five years to bring in any of the eight countries that have started the process of accession to the EU. Most would-be members are in the western Balkans.

Hahn emphasised the importance of promoting investment in cross-border projects in the western Balkans, saying that this “would be a substantial
contribution to the future coming-together of Balkan countries and their future capacity to become members of the EU”. He said the EU should be confident in making demands because “Europe is usually by far the biggest” trade partner, investor, and donor in the Balkans and Europe’s wider neighbourhood.

Speaking before Hahn’s comments, a diplomat from the Balkans said that his country particularly welcomed Chinese investment at present because “they are much less complicated than other partners”.

China’s strategic position will grow substantially in December when it finalises a contract with Serbia and Hungary to build a €2 billion high-speed railway from Belgrade to Budapest, part of a broader plan to speed up the delivery of goods from the partly Chinese-owned port of Piraeus in Greece.

Another diplomat said he saw Hahn’s comments as a reflection of de-politicisation of the Commission’s enlargement and neighbourhood policy by Juncker, whom he described as personally opposed to enlargement and heavily engaged in the background.