Slovenia ready to take on EU giants

Slovenia ready to take on EU giants

"It's a little bit like taxiing a 747 with a bicycle," one western diplomat observed. But for the former communist country, the first of the EU's 2004 intake of new members to assume the rotating presidency, it is a sign and a test of Slovenia's growing maturity.

When asked why Slovenia volunteered to take on the job so soon, Dimitrij Rupel, foreign minister, smiles and jokingly terminates the interview: "It was very nice speaking to you," he says.

Other countries have run a mile from taking on the cost and commitment of running the EU. Estonia, for example, has managed to avoid the fateful moment until 2018; Poland will not have its go until 2011.

One can see why. Slovenia has pencilled in €62m ($85m, £42m) as the cost of running the six-month presidency starting on January 1, while Janez Jansa, prime minister, reckons at least 70 per cent of his time will be devoted to European issues.

It is the diplomatic equivalent of hosting the Olympics. A brand new conference facility is taking shape at the lakeside venue of Brdo in the shadow of the Alps.

Slovenes expect to chair 3,000-4,000 meetings and are taking courses in how to conduct them, as well as crash courses in French; scores of officials are being dispatched to Brussels.

"Every country has to take its turn," says Mr Jansa, a former dissident jailed in 1988 after criticising the Yugoslav People's Army. "The question is not yes or no – it's when."

There was near unanimous parliamentary support in 2004 for Slovenia taking on the presidency, and the main parties have agreed to suspend hostilities on European issues while Mr Jansa is in the chair.

"We are taking this very seriously," Mr Jansa says, in an interview in his modern office in Ljubljana, the capital. He says smaller countries are sometimes better at running the EU because they focus on the job and are less able to push their own national agenda.

Mr Jansa hopes the long-running saga of the EU's revamped constitutional treaty will be largely sorted out under the current Portuguese presidency, and ratification of the text will be under way by the time he takes over.

The treaty, if approved, would hand over the job of running the European Council to a full-time president from 2009, although national capitals would still take turns to run ministerial councils.

Mr Jansa does not expect to have to get bogged down in EU battles over future budget priorities and agricultural spending – a struggle with France (defending farm subsidies) and Britain (defending its budget rebate).

He also hopes the question of Kosovo's future status will be resolved by January, but is ready for the issue to land on his plate. As a former Yugoslav republic, Slovenia has an emotional interest in bringing the region closer to the EU.

Then there is is the "very important issue" of how to meet the EU's highly ambitious plans to tackle climate change and deciding which country does what: the potentially explosive question of "burden-sharing".

For Janez Lenaric, the country's Europe minister, the task of chairing the EU is a reminder of how far Slovenia has come since independence in 1991. "Sometimes we are awed," he says.

But Slovenes are "thrifty people" and want to know what they will get for their investment in running the EU, he says.

Apart from the prestige and publicity, past experience suggests "income directly related to presidency activities are more than double the costs of the presidency".

Are they ready? "We can be quite confident," he says. "We have almost everything in place." As for the bicycle and the jumbo jet metaphor, he says: "It's more like piloting an Airbus A380."