The ins and outs of EU membership

This month we look at two countries, the Czech Republic and Germany, that seem to symbolize the different approaches aspirants and members take to club rules.

This month we look at two countries, the Czech Republic and Germany, that seem to symbolize the different approaches aspirants and members take to club rules. The Czechs, who want desperately to be accepted into the European Union, have paid strict heed to the group’s guidelines, while the Germans, who helped found the EU, don’t seem to be taking them very seriously.

Under unpredictable and strong-willed Prime Minister Milos Zeman, the Czech Republic has undergone a miraculous economic transformation. As Contributor Jonathan Kandell relates in “Czech Out Time”, Zeman, who bows out in June, and his fellow Czechs have aggressively pushed stodgy, state-owned companies into the private sector and encouraged foreign investors to participate in their economy. In the process, Zeman and his countrymen have turned the Czech Republic, whose economy actually shrank by 0.2 percent in the 1990s, into a respectable engine of growth: GDP increased by 2.9 percent in 2000 and 3.4 percent last year, despite the global recession. Once considered a long shot for EU admission, the revived republic is now in line to win the coveted membership in 2004.

Should they gain acceptance, the Czechs may wonder why they ever needed to follow EU dictates so closely. The government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder got itself in a jam earlier this year when the country’s then 2.6 percent deficit was on the verge of breaching the EU’s 3 percent limit. Worse yet, as European Editor Tom Buerkle notes in “Speaking Softly, but With No Big Stick” Germany had demanded the limit a decade ago as a condition of its EU participation. But when the EU’s chief enforcer of fiscal discipline, Pedro Solbes, proposed issuing a warning to Germany, Finance Minister Hans Eichel managed to get it quashed by furiously lobbying fellow members and promising to balance the country’s books in 2004. Similar pleas from an outsider like the Czech Republic would no doubt have met with a polite rebuff - and a request to reapply once its finances were in better order.

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