WAYWARD ENTRANTS FACE HOLLOW THREAT

The European Commission is warming up to telling Romania and Bulgaria that they can join in January.

It is making a lot of noise, implying that it has plenty of room for manoeuvre in that decision, but it doesn't. It maintains that it has plenty of sanctions up its sleeve if they fail to reform once they are in the European Union, but it doesn't.

The next official report from the Commission on the two applicants' progress, or lack of it, is due on September 26. After that, the 25-member club will decide whether to admit the two new members in January, or delay for a year.
But in practice, the decision seems all but made, despite the lack of progress by Bulgaria, in particular, over the summer.

The Commission has too many incentives to press ahead regardless of its misgivings about the entrants' readiness. Logistical pressures weigh against it: the cumbersome mechanisms for paying subsidies to farms are being put in place, and it would be difficult to unpick them in four months.

And those are trivial compared to the political pressures. The Commission does not want to do anything to boost the anti-immigration, antienlargement passions already swirling across the EU.

So it has resorted to warning Bulgaria and Romania that if they do not continue to improve it could impose penalties, coyly called "safeguard measures", once they join. But the threat seems hollow. The Commission could withhold regional aid for a time if it showed that it might be fraudulently diverted. But that is a complaint about the standard of bureaucracy in some ministries; it does not offer much of a lever on the government itself.

An even more serious concern, particularly in Bulgaria, has been about the courts' ability to tackle the breathtakingly pervasive corruption. Bulgaria's failure to remedy this in the past year has alarmed Brussels.

In theory, the Commission could refuse to recognise the rulings of Bulgarian courts after it joined the EU. But again, what is the force of this sanction, once the country has joined? Not great enough to prompt rapid change: that is the implication of Bulgaria's leisurely approach to reform.