outubro 16, 2004
Greek Cypriots block EU plan to help Turkish community
[Fonte: Financial Times]
A European Union bid to end the economic isolation of Turkish northern Cyprus has been scuppered, after the Greek Cypriot government won a protracted battle with its EU partners.
The Greek Cypriot authorities in Nicosia blocked a move by the European Commission to allow their Turkish counterparts to trade freely with the outside world.
The initiative has now been effectively shelved, after Britain, Germany and Sweden finally accepted they could not get the Greek Cypriots to move.
The Greek Cypriot "No" has infuriated the Commission, which wanted to bring the Turkish community into the economic mainstream.
But it revealed the power wielded by the internationally recognised Greek Cypriot government, which joined the EU on May 1, and now effectively holds a veto over moves to help the 200,000 people of the north.
The issue was settled this month after six separate meetings between EU ambassadors in Brussels, which saw Britain leading the fight on behalf of the Turkish Cypriots.
Under the deal agreed in Brussels, to be endorsed by EU foreign ministers on November 22, the Commission will shelve its plan to allow northern Cyprus to trade directly with the outside world.
Although a new timetable for progress will be agreed, Nicosia can ultimately deploy a veto, because it says the trade package would bestow international recognition on the north, occupied by Turkish troops since 1974.
The shelving of the trade deal meant Greek Cypriots were able to endorse a separate Commission plan to pump €259m ($321m, £179m) of aid into northern Cyprus to modernise the impoverished enclave.
The money was made available by the EU as a reward to the Turkish Cypriots, who voted Yes to a United Nations plan to reunite the island in a referendum on April 24. The plan was rejected by Greek Cypriots, now full members of the European Union, by a margin of 3 to 1 leaving the Turkish occupied north in the international wilderness.
The Nicosia authorities have also insisted on conditions on where money can be spent in the north, so that EU aid can only go to territory not owned by Greeks before 1974.
That means that only 15-20 per cent of the Turkish enclave can receive EU money, leaving the European Commission with a headache in how to distribute the cash.
"It's going to be difficult," said one official. "But the Greek Cypriots have us over a barrel - they are in the EU now, and there is nothing we can do."
The Commission will now aim to fund projects not tied to land, such as training schemes and agricultural machinery grants.
Britain and the other supporters of the Turkish community backed off partly to avoid antagonising the Nicosia government.
The Greek Cypriots, like the other 24 EU members, have a veto when the union decides whether to start accession talks with Turkey at a summit on December 17. Nicosia has already made it clear that its support should not be taken for granted.
Publicado por jpdias às 11:10 PM
outubro 17, 2004
Zoellick warns EU on linking trade disputes
[Fonte: Financial Times]
Robert Zoellick, the US trade representative, fired a warning shot at the European Union on Sunday, saying it would be taking a big gamble if it linked the escalating dispute over subsidies to Boeing and Airbus to a long-running fight over US corporate taxation.
Mr Zoellick told the Financial Times that such linkage would be "a risky course. If one does that it puts pressure on others to do that. I hope that's not the course they choose."
The comments came before his final meeting in Brussels on Monday with Pascal Lamy, the outgoing EU trade commissioner.
President George W. Bush is expected this week to sign a sweeping corporate tax bill that would eliminate the so-called Foreign Sales Corporation scheme that had been ruled an illegal tax subsidy by the World Trade Organisation. Mr Zoellick says the bill should bring an end to European trade sanctions.
But the EU is considering leaving some portion of the sanctions in place and targeting the penalties directly at imports of Boeing aircraft to punish the company for backing the WTO complaint against subsidies to Airbus launched by Washington this month.
But under the bill passed by Congress, Boeing will continue to receive a tax rebate under the FSC scheme for future sales of aircraft that have been ordered. The EU appears set to challenge that provision as a continued violation of the WTO ruling.
But Mr Zoellick warned that linking the two disputes would be damaging to the WTO dispute settlement process. "The EU likes to stress the importance of following the multilateral system, and the WTO is pretty explicit about not trying to link issues," he said. Such a linkage, he said, would "leave a very negative relationship with the Congress".
Publicado por jpdias às 10:59 PM
Integration of EU can go no further, warns Bolkestein
[Fonte: Financial Times]
The European Union has reached its highest point of integration and the eventual addition of Turkey and other countries as members will create "either chaos or a bureaucratic monstrosity in Brussels", Frits Bolkestein, the EU's internal market commissioner, has warned.
Mr Bolkestein, who opposed this month's Commission decision to recommend EU entry negotiations with Turkey, said it would be impossible to run the EU with 40 member states.
"Whoever lets in Turkey cannot very well refuse Ukraine. The western Balkans are already on track. There'll be Belarus, then Moldova. At the end of that process, which may take 20 years, only Russia will be excluded," Mr Bolkestein said. "You cannot hope to expand [the EU] and keep the same level of governance. That is impossible."
In an interview with the Financial Times, the commissioner made clear he was not predicting a sudden crisis for the EU, which this year grew to 25 member states after the addition of 10 mainly former communist east European countries. Instead, describing a gentle but steady decline with his hand, he said: "It will go down like that. The world will end not with a bang but with a whimper."
A Dutch liberal who worked for the Shell oil group before entering politics in the late 1970s, Mr Bolkestein has been an outspoken champion of liberal open markets in his five-year stewardship of the EU's single market. Speaking just two weeks before handing over his portfolio to Ireland's Charlie McCreevy, he blamed the large member states for most of the 1,500 single-market infringements the Commission is pursuing.
In characteristically blunt fashion, he also put much of the blame for Europe's high unemployment on the policies of Germany and France.
"Something must change both in Germany and France. It is time they joined the 21st century. There's too much old-fashioned, industrial-policy-type thinking."
Symptomatic of the two countries' "corporatist" approach was the idea of state-aided national industrial champions, which Mr Bolkestein said "arose out of the fertile brain of Mr [Nicolas] Sarkozy", the French finance minister. "I'm all for national champions, although I'd rather see European champions," he said. "But they have to come out of the market. If they need special government support, that is a nonsense."
Mr Bolkestein suggested that the failure to adapt was costing the two countries dear. "This famous European model that nobody seems able to define is responsible for high unemployment in France and Germany and some other places," he said. "So let's not get too uppity when we look across the Atlantic, thinking we are so much better than the quote-unquote Anglo Saxon casino capitalism - because it provides a lot of jobs for a lot of people."
The commissioner recalled that it was "mainly because the Germans turned tail" that the EU law to facilitate cross border takeovers was watered down. He said it was "not really worth the paper it is written on".
Regretting his failure to get an effective takeover directive through the European Parliament, Mr Bolkestein said: "It was very important. Everybody says they want European industrial policy. Here we had an important part of it and it failed." A fully integrated market in Europe must include shares as well as money, he said, "and if we don't achieve that, it will hold us back."
Mr Bolkestein admitted that the EU's goal of becoming the world's most competitive economy by 2010 "no longer seems in reach". The agenda, agreed by EU leaders in Lisbon in March 2000, was overloaded with supplementary goals such as social cohesion and sustainable development and must be slimmed down, he said. "The problem is that the Lisbon locomotive is pulling too many wagons. Everbody and his grandmother has planted their flag on one of those wagons."
Mr Bolkestein called upon José Manuel Barroso, the incoming Commission president, to state a few "elementary truths" in public. "One of these is that Europe will never be a federation," he said, adding that this "has never been said officially and it is time it was said".
The idea of a federal Europe "generates the wrong ideas", Mr Bolkestein explained. One was the "European tax, which is a bad idea". Another was "the idea that the Commission is the government of Europe, which we are not and which unfortunately Romano Prodi [the soon-to-retire Commission president] said at the beginning of his mandate."
Publicado por jpdias às 11:03 PM
Brussels power grab ahead of EU treaty
[Fonte: Financial Times]
The European Union's new constitution is not yet ratified, but moves are under way in Brussels to anticipate some of its key measures, regardless of whether it ever comes into force.
Members of the European parliament, who gain new powers under the constitutional treaty, are pressing for some of that extra influence now. However, the move is controversial, with some MEPs warning that cherry-picking parts of the treaty before it becomes law will be seen as undemocratic.
The constitution may never come into force, since it has to be ratified by all 25 member states, many of which will put the treaty to referendums over the next two years.
But political leaders in the European parliament are drawing up a list of reforms they would like to implement immediately, reflecting "the spirit" of the constitution.
They plan to ask European leaders to consult them fully in two areas where they currently have no formal role: reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy, and legislation in justice and home affairs.
The treaty would give them a legislative say in both areas, but European parliament officials say MEPs should at least be consulted on them before ratification.
"The parliament will propose making progress in areas where we don't prejudge the ratification of the treaty, but where it seems sensible to take steps forward in the spirit of the constitution," said one parliamentary official.
The formal request is expected to be made later in the year to Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister, who takes over the EU presidency in January.
But Andrew Duff, a Liberal Democrat member of the parliament's constitutional affairs committee, said: "I think it could look terribly bad if we tried to pick à la carte from the treaty those bits we especially like."
However he said the parliament should press the Council of Ministers - the EU's most powerful legislative body - to pre-empt the treaty by implementing the section which says they should decide new laws in public.
The European parliament is not alone in its impatience to carry out reforms now; eurozone finance ministers have pre-empted the treaty by appointing Mr Juncker as theirsemi-permanent president - dubbed "Mr Euro" - a job foreseen in the treaty.
An embryonic EU diplomatic service is also being prepared for the time when, or if, a new EU foreign minister is created by the treaty.
Publicado por jpdias às 11:06 PM