EU governments thrash out how to make enlarged bloc work

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The challenges of expanding the European Union by up to eight countries were being discussed by governments on Thursday, with significant changes to the bloc’s decision-making, agriculture and regional aid budgets needed if it is to grow further.

The talks among EU affairs ministers of the 27 current members states in the Spanish town of Murcia are to lay the groundwork for an EU summit on Oct 5-6.

“Today is a council that prepares the summit in 10 days with a discussion on enlargement,” French Europe Minister Laurence Boone told reporters on entering the meeting.

Eight countries currently have official EU candidate status – Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia – while two, Georgia and Kosovo, are potential candidate countries.

“We have to prepare ourselves to take decisions with more than 30 members,” German Europe Minister Anna Luhrmann said.

Guiding the talks will be a paper prepared by French and German scholars which calls for a radical overhaul of the EU’s decision-making and funding before it can accept more countries by a tentative deadline of 2030.

Decision-making is key because the EU now requires unanimity on foreign and security policy, taxes, EU finances, some areas of justice and home affairs and social security and protection.

This has already been criticised by some governments and experts as either substantially slowing or even blocking the EU’s development, as all decisions in these areas have to be reduced to the lowest common denominator.

Yet changes would require amendments to EU treaties, a long and difficult process that itself would require unanimity.

“It is already difficult to take decisions among the 27, so we need to reform the way we function, our institutional setup, to work properly with more member states,” Portuguese Europe Minister Tiago Antunes said.

“We also have to look at the impact of enlargement on major policies of the EU like the agriculture policy and regional policy, the impact it will have on the European budget and we will also discuss differentiated, gradual integration,” he said.

EU agriculture policy would need to be revamped because the admission of agriculture powerhouse Ukraine would dramatically change current EU direct payments to farmers.

A similarly major change would happen to the EU’s regional policy, under which poorer EU members receive money to raise their standard of living.

The agriculture and regional funds make up two thirds of the EU budget, which totals roughly 1% of the bloc’s gross national income a year. The Franco-German paper said the budget, worth around a trillion euros in 2021-27, should be bigger — a highly contested idea in the EU.

The paper, which polarised EU governments when first discussed on Sept. 19, said some countries in the EU should be allowed to form closer cooperation than others, forming four tiers of European integration.

The deepest integration would be in the inner circle similar to the euro zone using the single currency and the passport-free Schengen travel zone.

The second tier would be the EU itself, a yet larger circle would be made up of Associate Members who would participate in the EU’s single market for goods and services and adhere to the EU’s common principles.

Finally there would be the European Political Community – a forum proposed by France that was launched last year – as an outer tier for political cooperation without having to be bound to EU law, it said.

(Reporting by Jan Strupczewski)