Yet, disenchantment should not be exaggerated. Naturally, flood-affected farmers throughout the region - from the Czech Republic to Poland - are vigorously protesting their unequal treatment and the compromises their governments are arm-twisted into making. Still, according to a survey released last December by the European Commission, 60 percent of the denizens of the accession countries support it.
As the endgame nears, the parties to the negotiations are posturing, though. EU enlargement commissioner, Gunter Verheugen, argued a fortnight ago against equalizing support for Poland's 6 million farmers with the subsidies given to the EU's 8 million smallholders. In a typical feat of incongruity he said it will prevent them from modernizing and alienate other professions.
Franz Fischler, the Austrian EU's agriculture commissioner, hinted that miserly production quotas for cereals, meat and dairy products, offered by the EU to the seething applicants, can be augmented. The EU presently provides the candidate countries with funding, within the Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development (SAPARD) to support farm investments, to boost processing and marketing of farm and fishery products and to bankroll infrastructure improvements. Hungarian farmers, for instance, are entitled to up to $38 million of SAPARD money annually.
In a thinly veiled threat, Fischler included this in a speech he made in a recent official visit to Estonia:
"The EU enlargement countries should be pleased with the 25 per cent agriculture subsidies, as the member states have not agreed even on that yet, therefore this should be the first goal and only after that can further subsidies be discussed … It would not be very wise to tell the EU member states that accession countries are not pleased, that would not be positive for the whole process."
Small wonder he was whistled down by irate Polish parliamentarians in an address to a joint session of the parliamentary committees for agriculture and European integration in the Sejm. Poland's fractured farm sector is notoriously inefficient. With one quarter of the labor force it produces less than 4 percent of GDP. But the peasants are well represented in the legislature and soaring unemployment - almost one fifth of all adults - makes every workplace count.
In the meantime, the ten would-be new members of the EU have teamed up to present their case in Brussels. Their ministers of finance, foreign affairs and of agriculture, parliamentary deputies in their finance and farm committees - all issued and issue common statements, position papers, briefings and memoranda of understanding. But no one is inclined to take such ad-hoc alliances among the candidate countries seriously. The disparity between their farm sectors is such that it rules out a single voice.
Moreover, the EU is strained to the limit of its habitual consensus-driven decision making. The breakdown of the European mechanism of deliberation was brought into sharp relief by the way in which the future of the CAP was decided in a series of chats between the leaders of France and Germany in a hotel in Brussels. Their deal was later rubber stamped, unaltered, in a summit of all EU members last month.
The Union is in constitutional and institutional flux. Small and even medium sized members - such as the United Kingdom - are marginalized. As the EU grows to 25 countries, a core of leadership will emerge. It will involve Germany, France and, potentially the UK and Italy.
These will hand down blueprints to be fleshed out by the less significant states and by an increasingly sidelined European Commission and a make-believe European Parliament.