Interview with Jean-François Rischard, Vice President for Europe

At the time, I was managing the Investment Department, and we had large TV screens in the trading room. Watching the events unfolding live, my first thoughts were for the joyful explosion of freedom itself--people chipping the wall down and running all over the city--and for what this all meant in terms of a better future for us all. By happenstance, I had just read Stefan Zweig’s fascinating ‘The World of Yesterday’, and remember thinking how the pre-1914 world he described, where you could cross the whole of Europe without a passport, could well be right back. And a few days later, seeing Ernie Stern, one of the senior vice-presidents then in the Bank, I mused that we would probably end up lending to…the Russians. “No way,” he said.

Looking back at the transition period of almost 15 years - what do you find most remarkable about the whole process?

The speed at which the Accession countries adapted to an entirely new societal and economic paradigm has been really remarkable, with even some really astonishing cases: Estonia, for example, is trumping quite a few existing EU member countries when it comes to WBI’s knowledge-based economy indicators. And, of course, one has to pull one’s hat off in view of the Accession candidates’ successful efforts to accommodate 80,000 pages of “acquis communautaire.”

Is becoming an EU member a model recipe for economic and social development?

In a way, the EU accession methodology has indeed proven to create powerful accelerated development effects in candidate countries. If you think about it, this methodology, with its benchmarking and emulation ingredients, is possibly the better tool for unleashing development and integration effects in neighboring countries compared with, say, traditional foreign policy and aid tools. That’s why the Wider Europe Initiative, under which that methodology would be extended (even though in a modified form) to other Eastern European and Middle-East countries, is so promising.

What impact will enlargement have for the European Union’s Development Policy? 

On the good news front, the new EU members will start from low ODA/GNI bases and inch them up quickly, while benefiting from the coaching effect of established EU development agencies. The experience from Greece, Portugal. Ireland shows how accession countries can quickly become significant actors on the development scene. But I am worried that the attempt by six large existing EU members to cap the EC budget at 1 percent of European GDP, combined with the $20 billion-odd structural and cohesion funds which enlargement countries will get over several years to come, may   put a squeeze on resources available for development programs at large---especially in the period of generalized  fiscal woes to come.