The European Commission report in February pointed at some Romanian cynicism in reforming Justice, The Economist comments. The newspaper claims that sanctions against Romania and Bulgaria should not be expected in this summer's report, namely safeguarding clauses will not be activated. European officials consider that no one would win from having the EU states refusing to admit Romanian Justice decisions.

In brief:

The Economist peeks in its last issue the European Union enlargement process, Romania being analyzed from several point of view:

* The reports issued about the Romanian Justice were rough and signaled Romania's cynicism in reforming the Justice system;

* The pace of reforms slowed down after the accession to the EU, a fact valid for all new member states, including Romania;

* Imposing the safeguarding clauses would not help any side, since the reform is easier from the inside;

* EU emphasized on the Justice reform and the anti-graft campaign, not for lustration. Still, the boundary between corruption and the former secret services is difficult to draw.

The article published byThe Economist:

In the European Union, rhetoric often precedes reality. From earliest days, its founders followed the principle that where fine words led, with a bit of luck facts would follow. Sometimes, though, the gap between what the EU declares and what its citizens sense in their guts grows dangerously wide—and that is when the union gets into some of its worst jams.

Take the rule of law in the enlarged EU of 27. Officially, all members of the club are assumed to be equally committed to upholding Europe’s legal rules (as defined by the 80,000 pages of Euro-law that new members must adopt), as well as the woollier virtues of “European values”. But does anyone believe Bulgarian judges, as a group, are as determined to crack down on organised crime as, say, their Swedish counterparts? Since 2001 there have been an estimated 120 contract killings in Bulgaria, and not one of them has been solved.

This summer the European Commission will publish reports on the justice systems in Bulgaria and Romania (both of which are on probation until the end of 2009). Interim reports in February were not kind. Bulgaria, the commission found, had not produced convincing results in fighting high-level corruption and organised crime. Of a sample of ten high-profile Mafia cases registered between 2000 and 2007, only one had been concluded. Ordered to clamp down on corrupt officials at border posts, the customs service had suggested annual checks.

Romania’s report uncovered less blood but more cynicism. “Procedural errors” had blocked criminal probes into corruption by serving or former ministers. Romania’s parliament had made significant changes to a criminal-investigation law, including a demand that suspects be informed in advance if their telephone was going to be tapped, and the downgrading of embezzlement worth less than €9m to a “minor” offence. Under heavy EU pressure the parliament is currently taking a second look at this law.

The commission has already suspended tens of millions of euros in funds for Bulgaria, for fear of fraud. Barring a dramatic change, the next report may well recommend freezing billions of euros. The EU also has the power to suspend Europe-wide recognition of court judgments in Bulgaria and Romania. That would be serious.

The EU principle of mutual recognition means that many civil rulings can be enforced across borders. A European arrest warrant can send Italian police to pound on doors in Rome at the request of officers in London, and can secure a suspect’s swift extradition.

But few expect the sanction to be invoked. EU officials acknowledge the contradiction involved in asking people to trust the new member states even as they issue devastating reports about them. But the officials also say that very little would be gained by suspending mutual recognition. Crooked judges “will just laugh at us”, argues one official, whereas reformers trying to change the system from within would lose ground.

Romania, Bulgaria and several other countries admitted to the EU since 2004 started sliding away from the rule of law almost as soon as they entered. The case is put forcefully by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a Romanian academic, who calls the EU admission process a “nearly miraculous” incentive for governments to clean up their act. But the effect wore off the day they were in, “like a short-term anaesthetic”. The EU enlargement process is aimed at integrating new members into the web of EU standards, rules and subsidies, not at transforming its political rulers, says Ms Mungiu-Pippidi. So as long as islands of excellence within national bureaucracies were able to churn out what the invigilators in Brussels wanted, the accession process trundled happily along.

Her evidence makes depressing reading. For example, with accession safely accomplished, the Slovene parliament voted to close down an EU-inspired anticorruption commission, which had to be saved by the country’s constitutional court. In Latvia the prime minister tried to fire the head of his country’s anticorruption agency until a public outcry stayed his hand. In Romania the justice minister, Monica Macovei (revered in Brussels as the country’s most effective sleaze-buster), was sacked three months after EU entry, accused by her prime minister of failing to uphold “government solidarity”.

This March it was the turn of the Bulgarian interior minister, Rumen Petkov, to lose his job, this time under heavy pressure from Brussels. A leaked intelligence report said a drug gang had received top-secret documents from officials in his ministry, and Mr Petkov admitted to having met suspected organised-crime bosses, though he says he was trying to stop contract killings.

All this murk is having an effect on the EU’s ability to push ahead with closer cooperation in justice and home affairs. Enthusiasm for strengthening Europol, a pan-EU police agency, and Eurojust, which brings together European public prosecutors, has been diminished, says a senior official. “On the other hand,” he adds, “if you want to combat serious organised crime, you need to work with the Bulgarians.”

The broader rule of law has also come under strain. Populists, of both the buffoonish and the sinister variety, have done alarmingly well in elections across the new member countries since 2004. In Slovakia, Vladimir Meciar, who led his country away from the democratic path in the 1990s, returned to office as a junior member of the current ruling coalition. The current Slovak government recently introduced a worryingly broad press law that allows those criticised by the newspapers the right to a prominent rebuttal.

After their countries joined, voters in Romania and Bulgaria sent a clutch of hardline nationalists to sit in the European Parliament. In Hungary, violent street protests broke out after the prime minister admitted to lying about the state of the economy to win re-election. Poland’s first years as an EU member saw a string of political crises as Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, identical twins, shored up their conservative coalition government with radical nationalists and populists.

Why the time was right

Do such antics add up to proof that enlargement was premature? Defenders of the EU accession process say no, offering various arguments to support their claim. The most widely used and least convincing is that the accession process was extremely rigorous. The new members underwent far tougher scrutiny than previous entrants, says one senior commission official: Bulgaria and Romania faced detailed questions about the treatment of prisoners, for example, and in Cyprus domestic violence was a big issue. “There are old member states that would not pass that degree of scrutiny,” the official adds. But complying with benchmarks does not prove a country is ready. It might simply mean that the EU had set the wrong benchmarks.

It is also true that foreigner-bashing populists have done well at recent elections across old Europe: just look at voting patterns in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria. But pointing to flaws in long-standing member countries is a double-edged argument: if EU membership is an inherently civilising process, as many Eurocrats claim, why is it that half a century in the club has not yet made Italy a model of good governance?

Ironically, one force that may have stunted political development in the new members is the process of enlargement itself. With the best of intentions, EU officials and Western diplomats emasculated governments in the ex-communist block, hemming them in with action plans and targets so that it barely mattered which party was in office, since all were committed to achieving EU membership. Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian academic, has written that for ordinary voters the accession era felt like a powerless time when they could “change governments but not policies”.

Perhaps a better argument for defending enlargement is a more modest one: that EU membership has proved more useful than the pessimists think, despite its limits. EU rules put a lid on the havoc that nationalists can wreak, for instance. They make it unlawful to discriminate against ethnic minorities in the job market or close borders to a neighbour’s goods. Bulgaria’s Mr Petkov was doubtless a flawed interior minister, but he did resign in the end. His departure was hastened by an independent body founded two years ago at the EU’s urging, the National Security Agency.

Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the former Latvian president who steered her Baltic republic through the accession process, describes EU membership as a gradual process that does not end on the day of accession: “It is not like being a born-again Christian, where supposedly the Holy Ghost descends on you and from then on you are a different person.”

In Bulgaria, Georgi Stoytchev of the Open Society Institute says the EU can never mobilise society against organised crime from the outside. To many ordinary Bulgarians, smuggling gangs mean “cheap cigarettes and cheap alcohol. If gangsters shoot gangsters, it is one way of dealing with the problem.” The government, he predicts, will act only if it is leant on by legitimate business lobbies.

The best argument for letting in countries like Bulgaria and Romania sooner rather than later is the most modest of all: waiting a few more years would not have done any good. A whole generation of corrupt old judges will have to leave office before things change, says an EU official. “My only hope is the younger generation wants to do it differently.” Reformers in that younger generation need protecting, both for the sake of their own country and of Europe as a whole. A look at the rest of the western Balkans suggests that this is more easily done inside the EU than outside.