European Union leaders met Thursday with counterparts from 11 other states to talk about expansion.
The 26-nation summit was aimed at establishing the relevance of the EU’s ambitious enlargement drive, three weeks before formal membership talks open with 10 East European nations and Cyprus.
Opening the talks in an ornate room at Lancaster House, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the expansion effort “only the beginning of the process of our reconciliation of the two parts of Europe.”
The goal of nearly doubling the EU ranks, Blair added, is to make Europe “stable, secure, peaceful and prosperous.” Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus are on a fast track for membership, though they won’t join for five or six years. The admission of Latvia, Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Slovakia is far more distant.
Turkey boycotted the gathering, miffed at its rejection as a candidate. The EU planned the meeting to show Ankara that while an offer of EU membership for Turkey is not imminent, it wants to keep the country close to the family of European nations. Ankara hasn’t been mollified by the gesture and insists on EU membership or nothing. The EU has rejected Turkey’s membership, saying Ankara is not ready politically or economically and still has serious human-rights problems.
Ankara acknowledges that it cannot meet all membership criteria but says it sees the rejection by what it calls an overwhelmingly Christian club as stemming more from Islam and immigration than economics and politics.
Also Thursday, France threatened to veto a European Union plan for an ambitious new free-trade pact with the United States hailed by Britain and Germany as an important step forward in trans-Atlantic trade.
President Jacques Chirac said the pact needed unanimous approval in principle, giving Paris a right to veto it.
The proposal, unanimously approved by the European Commission, instructs EU Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan to open negotiations with the United States on removing barriers to trans-Atlantic trade in goods and services, a pillar of the world economy worth more than $383 billion in 1996. It calls for a sweeping removal of technical barriers to trade in goods and a free-trade area in services.
