Poland hopes to help accelerate the push by Croatia and Serbia to join the European Union when it takes the helm of the 27-nation bloc later this year, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday.

“I won’t rule out that under our presidency we’ll make strides in the process of EU enlargement. Notably regarding Croatian accession and speeding up talks with Serbia,” Tusk told reporters.

Poland takes over the six-month rotating leadership of the EU on July 1 from fellow ex-communist state Hungary, which has also made Croatia and Serbia’s integration a priority of its presidency.

With 38 million people, Poland is the largest of the mainly ex-communist nations to have joined the EU since the bloc’s 2004 big-bang expansion from 15 members.

Warsaw, which has increasingly sought to punch its weight within the EU, is a staunch supporter of membership for other states from behind the former Iron Curtain.

Croatia hopes to conclude E.U. accession talks by the middle of this year in order to join the union by 2012.

Serbia, meanwhile, aims to pave the way this year for the formal launch of accession talks in 2012,

The E.U. last October agreed to examine Serbia’s candidacy as a reward for its softened stance on talks with breakaway, ethnic-Albanian majority Kosovo.

But the E.U. has also demanded stepped-up Serbian cooperation with the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia and renewed efforts to snare suspected war criminals from the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s.

January 19, 2011
AFP

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