Hungary

AGRICULTURE Commissioner Franz Fischler will make a keynote visit to Romania and Bulgaria later this month, with farming on top of the agenda of three days of talks officially dealing with all aspects of the Union’s enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe.

COMMISSION officials are currently gearing up for the onslaught of a tidal waveof paperwork put togetherby hundreds of government officials in Bucharest, Budapest, Tallinn, Ljubljana and Prague.

12-18 July 1996Friday 12 July

Enlargement could turn out to be a bit of joke unless the European Commission improves its knowledge of geography.

12 July – 19 December 1996Monday 15 July

7 July – 1 October 1996Sunday 7 July

From Ritt BjerregaardIt is with great interest thatI read the eight-page environment survey in last week’s issue of European Voice (volume 2, issue 22).

OF the formerly Communist countries that emerged from the debris of the Cold War, the most puzzling is arguably Slovakia.

FROM Bratislava Castle, the symbol of the Slovak state, you can see the seat of the United Nations in Vienna and the distant Alps.

IF EU politicians were asked secretly to pick their favourite amongst the Union’s ten enlargement candidates in Central and Eastern Europe, their choice would almost certainly be the Czech Republic.

Each applicant country has been asked to complete a series of questions on its suitability for Union membership. Thomas Klau examines this mostly symbolic exercise

“Our grand vision of the futuremakes no sense if we do not tackle employment problems.”Commission President Jacques Santer in his opening addressat a two-day round table intendedto launch his ‘confidence pact’ tofight unemployment.

AMID all the sound and fury over aviation agreements with the United States, clashes with Austria over tolls and controversy over state aids to lame duck airlines, another key area of EU transport policy has hardly attracted any attention.

GOVERNMENTS are in danger of forgetting much needed reforms to the European economy in their single-minded pursuit of the Maastricht Treaty’s budget-cutting targets, warns a leading industrialist.

NEW restrictions in the pipeline will reduce MEPs’ opportunities for exotic overseas travel through their membership of one of the European Parliament’s score of interparliamentary delegations.

NOW that it has restored diplomatic ties with Serbia and Montenegro, the coast is clear for the Union to begin mapping out strategies for the Balkan region as a whole.

A LONG chapter in the history of European monetary policy came to an end in Verona last weekend.

THEY have a partnership pact as thick as a telephone book. And they have big plans. But neither the European Union nor Russia are quite sure what that means.

LIKE unemployment, the future of Central and Eastern Europe is meant to top the agenda of every EU government.

DRASTIC anti-subversion legislation approved by the Slovakian parliament last week has triggered fresh concerns in Brussels that the country is moving further and further away from the democratic standards expected of future EU members.

THIS June’s presidential election in Russia will be watched with interest across the world.

WHEN pundits and politicians say that enlargement will force the EU to change, the country they are really talking about is Poland.

IF Hungary gets its way, the EU might well have 22 members by the end of the decade.

MEPs investigating transit fraud in the Union are casting the net as wide as possible in their search for detailed evidence on the mounting challenges facing the multi-billion-ecu sector.