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Only a few issues involving Austria, Bulgaria, Italy and Poland remain to be cleared up before the European Union achieves a long-sought deal on modernising its institutions, EU officials and diplomats said on Tuesday. They expressed confidence that a two-day summit in Lisbon on Thursday and Friday would wrap up the EU’s “reform treaty”, setting the stage for a more self-confident, less introspective phase of EU activity. The treaty, successor to a doomed EU constitutional treaty rejected by Dutch and French voters in 2005, must still be ratified by all 27 member states to come into effect in 2009.There is some concern in European capitals that the sudden political difficulties of Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, could imperil British ratification of the treaty. However, many EU governments hold the view that Britain, with its opt-outs from judicial and police co-operation and from the treaty’s charter of fundamental rights, has little to complain about in terms of threatened sovereignty.Ahead of Lisbon, most EU governments regard points of disagreement as small compared with the difficulties that have turned previous summits into diplomatic battlegrounds. “There is no reason, no excuse not to come to an agreement this week in Lisbon,” José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, said in Berlin on Monday.Poland, which holds a general election on Sunday, is likely to extract concessions on demands that underline its reputation as the most assertive of the ex-communist countries in the EU.Poland’s first demand is that the European Court of Justice should have an extra advocate-general, or senior court official, to give the EU’s east European member states representation.The second demand is to entrench the right of outvoted countries to delay EU decisions for at least a few months, as allowed since 1994 under the so-called Ioannina compromise. Poland wants this right included in the treaty’s official text or to obtain more clarity on the legal status of the compromise.Austria wants to set quotas for foreign students.Italy’s objection that it will lose parity with France and the UK in a reallocation of European parliament seats may be dealt with by December, diplomats said.Last, Bulgaria’s insistence on its right to use the word “evro” for the euro – resisted by the European Central Bank – is being shunted to one side as a temporary “linguistic-technical problem”.As in the days of Noah....
