II. THE CZECH REPUBLIC AND THE EU
THE CZECH REPUBLIC AND THE EUROPEAN UNION Czechoslovakia´s wish to become a member of the European Communities (EC) was expressed in many ways. One of the first was the slogan on the election billboards of the revolutionary Civic Forum platform, “Back into Europe”. In December 1990, Czechoslovakia opened talks with the EC on the establishment of an Association Agreement. One year later, Czechoslovakia signed the Agreement, along with Hungary and Poland.
After the disintegration of Czechoslovakia, the European Communities suspended the ratification process. The Czech diplomacy, led by Foreign Minister Josef Zieleniec, exerted intensive efforts in order to make up for the time lost. As a result, in 1993 the two sides signed an agreement “establishing an association between the Czech Republic on the one side and the European Communities and their member states on the other side”. The agreement entered into force on 1 February 1995. Until then, the mutual relations were governed by a Provisional Agreement. At its meeting in Copenhagen in June 1993, the European Council decided that the associated countries in Central and Eastern Europe so wishing could become members of the European Union. It was also established that the accession would take place as soon as the country concerned was in a position to accept all the membership obligations, was meeting the required economic and political conditions and had sufficient administrative and judicial capacity needed for the Adoption of the Acquis. At the meeting in Essen in December 1994, the European Council called upon the Commission to make a detailed analysis of the potential impacts of the eastern enlargement of the EU on the politics of the European Union and its future development. The internal report was submitted to the European Council at its session in Madrid in December 1995. The Council asked the Commission to prepare opinions on the individual membership applications as soon as possible after the closing of the intergovernmental conference and to start preparing a summary document on the course of the enlargement. On 17 January 1996, the Czech Republic filed its application for membership of the European Union through the Prime Minister of the Czech Government, Václav Klaus.
THE 1996-2004 PERIOD In July 1997, the European Commission published its document – Agenda 2000 – in which it subscribed to the idea of a “stronger and larger union” and published Opinions on the preparedness of all candidate countries. The Commission also established that it would inform the European Council regularly about the progress the Central and East European countries had made in their preparations for membership. In its Opinion, the Commission recommended membership negotiations to be opened with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Slovenia, and Cyprus. In December 1977, at the summit in Luxembourg, the
European Council entrusted the Commission with the preparation of Regular Reports on the progress made by the individual candidate states for membership. At its meeting in Luxembourg on 13 December 1997, on the recommendation of the Commission, the European Council decided to tender an official invitation to 11 candidate states to join the EU. For the Czech Republic, the invitation was taken over by President Václav Havel, accompanied by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Jaroslav Šedivý. The summit in Luxembourg further decided that bilateral intergovernmental conferences would be called in spring 1998, where accession talks with six states – Cyprus, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia (known as the Luxembourg Group) – would be opened. The actual enlargement process was started at a meeting in Brussels on 30 March 1998, attended by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the EU15 and the 11 candidate states, including the Czech Republic. The legal framework was formulated in the Accession Partnership deed. In Brussels, the Czech Republic submitted its National Programme of Preparations for EU Membership, issued in succession in 1999, 2000, and 2001. The first part of the talks on the entry of the Czech Republic into the EU – known as the “screening”, i.e. analytical comparison of the legislation of the candidate countries with EU law – opened in Brussels in April 1998. Actual accession talks, at ministerial level, started in November 1998, after preliminary technical negotiations. For screening purposes, the ACQUIS was divided by areas into 31 chapters. Before the opening of each of the chapters, the European Commission proposed the adoption of a common negotiating position of the Union, which was approved by the Council and presented by the presiding country. All the candidate states, represented at the talks by their chief negotiator and his team, also prepared their positions on all 31 chapters. The head of the Czech negotiation team was Pavel Telička, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, appointed on 14 January 1998. His comment on the complicated and often very demanding negotiations, was: “The negotiations were unprecedented, in terms of their comprehensive character, factual content, technical complexity and political significance, hardly comparable with anything in our history to date. This is true despite the fact that the European Union significantly narrowed down our negotiation space and relatively largely defined the conditions.” The main negotiator of the European Commission was Klaus van der Pas, with Michael Leigh and, from the year 2000, with Rutger Wissels at the head of the negotiating
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