Hungary presses EU for accession date

The approach to the presidential reception room in Vienna's Hofburg Palace brings one through a succession of breathtaking Rococo chambers, decorated in the time of Maria Theresa with the gold enamelling, white porcelain and red silk characteristic of the period. After being greeted by the President I spied a Hungarian friend, an academic who works in Vienna.

When I remarked upon the sheer splendour of the room, he put his back against the wall, looked carefully around and agreed. "Yes", he said, "it's here they used to humiliate the Hungarian nobility".

I recalled the remark of an Irishman in Budapest the week before who said he rarely went to the Austrian capital. It is too expensive for those on Hungarian incomes, which might be six to 10 times less, he explained. "And besides, most Hungarians think of Vienna as the city that took all our money away from us for 400 years".

The Austrian government had a tricky task during its EU presidency ending in December to assure the Hungarian government of its goodwill so far as EU enlargement is concerned. Many Austrians actively oppose it, especially those living in border regions such as Burgenland, in the belief that free labour migration will endanger their jobs and an increased flow of refugees put pressure on already stretched Austrian capacity to receive the 500,000 or so people they have absorbed in recent years.

There is much trade across the border, as Austrians flock to buy cheap goods and services such as dental treatment, while Hungarians workers commute for work. On their side, the Hungarians fear that agricultural land selling at one-tenth of the price in Austria would be bought up. Already property and shares in Budapest are going that way.

Diplomats in Budapest give the Austrians credit for doing their best with a brief containing many reservations other than their own about the timing and detail of accession negotiations. It was made even more tricky by the new Hungarian government's obsession with the date of accession. The Prime Minister and leader of the centre-right neoliberal Fidesz party, Mr Viktor Orban, told the Austrian magazine Format that the EU's reluctance to set a firm date is "insulting and degrading".

Hungary is preparing to join in 2002, and he wants political agreement on that. He is not reassured by suggestions that the accession could be put back to 2005 or even 2007 to suit Austrian and German interests.

EU representatives say it is one thing for the Hungarian government to set such a deadline for its own political and administrative planning, quite another to seek a firm date before the negotiations are completed and a judgment made by the Commission on whether the country has not only adopted the acquis communautaire but is capable of implementing and enforcing it. They question the tactical advisability of the Hungarian government's attempt to bargain long transitional periods for labour migration against other elements such as the date of accession.

In fact, Hungary is probably the best prepared of the front-running accession states for membership and keen to give that impression. The chairman of the European Integration Affairs Committee in the national assembly, Dr Jozsef Szajer, told me they need a date in order to implement their electoral programme, which includes radical adjustments to the privatisation, rural and welfare policies of their predecessors in office, a coalition of the ex-communist Socialists and the smaller Free Democrats.

Observers note the next Hungarian elections are scheduled for May 2002. The government is understandably anxious to capitalise as much as possible on the EU negotiations then, a top priority for this as for the previous government. Fidesz's share of the vote jumped from 7 per cent in 1994 to 28.2 per cent last May, much of it a protest vote against perceived mismanagement and austerity by the outgoing Socialists, who put through a radical programme of privatisation and welfare cuts.

Fedesz represents a younger generation of provincial liberals. They are out of favour in Budapest cafe society and seen as zealous, suspicious and ideologically driven by their opponents, who they suspect were subverted by the ex-communists. Plans to fund reforms by faster growth have yet to materialise.

Fidesz is in coalition with the Smallholders' Party and is anxious to put right imbalances between urban and rural society and between the wealthier west and the poorer east of the country. It has criticised the outgoing government's policies on the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia.

Talk of autonomy for minorities has universally been taken as code for secession or irredentism in this part of the world; the idea that raw ethnic nationalism can be civilised by overarching legal, minority and human rights norms underwritten by the EU, NATO, the Council Of Europe and the OSCE is still young and delicate, although it holds out great promise.

In Slovakia the new government has appointed a member of the 500,000-strong Hungarian minority to the intergovernmental committee with Hungary, which is seen as a remarkable gesture. In Romania, by contrast, the 2.7 million Hungarian minority, although protected by the recent treaty, is seen as vulnerable to political change which could bring a radical right-wing party to power in the next election. Unfortunately imposition of the Schengen system will close the Romanian borders.

Irish affairs are followed with care and sympathetic interest by informed Hungarians. The Belfast Agreement has much to offer as a model of intergovernmental as well as majority-minority relations. Multiple identities are a characteristic feature of politics and history in Hungary and its eight neighbouring states; but political boundaries drawn after the first World War by the Treaty of Trianon still jar with many Hungarians.

My Hungarian friend could manage only a wan smile when I reminded him of the response of Otto von Habsburg, the octogenarian MEP, when asked if he was going to the Austria-Hungary soccer match: "Oh yes, and who are we playing?" But he warmed to the suggestion that Joyce's Ulysses, conceived in multiplicitous Trieste, might appropriately be described, in Anthony Burgess's words, as the greatest Austro-Hungarian novel, so full is it of such references. Griffith's study of the Dual Monarchy between Austria and Hungary intrigued Joyce, but only one copy of it is to be found in Budapest libraries.