November 10, 2003	Monday	Ramazan 14, 1424

BRUSSELS: It hasn’t even formally joined the club yet, but Poland is already making waves — and enemies — over its tough, self-centred approach to life in the European Union.

With Warsaw negotiating hard over the EU’s new constitution, murmurs of irritation about its behaviour are being heard loud and clear.

Many agree with Louis Michel, Belgium’s foreign minister, who recently attacked Poland’s attitude as “un-European”. Others complain that Leszek Miller, the country’s leftwing prime minister, is threatening the overall success of next year’s “big bang” enlargement, when membership leaps from 10 to 25.

“The Poles must learn that the EU is about compromise,” warned one diplomat. “If a German behaved like Miller, some would feel reminded of Germany’s dark past.” Adjectives like “dangerous” and “irresponsible” are being bandied around in Brussels.

Warsaw disagrees. “Portraying Poland as an egoistic country which does not understand what the EU is about is a form of pressure,” retorted the foreign minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz. “No such pressure will succeed.”

The immediate issue is the constitutional talks, which include proposed changes to voting weights in EU ministerial councils. This highly technical question is about how easy it is to get your way — or block others getting theirs — when votes are taken. Details were agreed three years ago at the Nice summit — itself designed to rewrite EU decision-making rules. Poland secured a terrific deal: with a population of under 40 million it got only two votes less than the total allotted to Germany — with more than 80 million people — along with France, Britain and Italy.

The problem returned when Valiry Giscard d’Estaing’s European convention opted for a system that more closely reflects population size. Its formula, requiring votes to be won by a simple majority of member states so long as they represent 60 per cent of total population, went down very badly in Warsaw.

Cimoszewicz, lobbying in Brussels last week, suggested that counting populations was not as simple as it looked. What about the 20 million Poles living abroad, or the huge Irish or Italian diasporas? More seriously, he signalled that, if Nice is overturned, Poles are likely to vote “no” in a referendum on the constitution, putting the entire project at risk.

It was Jan Rokita, an opposition leader, who coined the slogan “Nice or death” — redolent of the romantic strain in the country’s tragic history. But it has now entered the mainstream political lexicon — and some fear that Miller’s unpopular government, weakened by scandals and facing powerful eurosceptic and populist opposition, has unwisely painted itself into a corner.

Poland is strongly backed by Spain, which won an identical allocation at Nice. But whereas the more experienced Spanish invariably strike a deal in the end, the Poles are adamant that they will not: “I can’t imagine a compromise because either you have Nice or you don’t,” Cimoszewicz insisted.

Beyond the constitutional row, Poland matters a lot to the EU. It is the largest of the new intake — providing half of the 75 million people joining and half their economic output — and its membership is of profound historical significance.

Repeatedly occupied and partitioned, squeezed between Russia and Germany and abandoned to Soviet power at Yalta in 1945, it was the first eastern bloc country to throw off communism.

Its long-delayed return to the democratic West was sealed in a referendum last summer — with the Pope himself calling for a yes vote. From next May Poland will mark the EU’s eastern border with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.