The historical importance of the Zagreb summit of the Central European Initiative (CEI) dwells in the fact that for the first time in its nine-years' history discussions focussed more on economic than political aspects of regional cooperation. Croatia, the hosting and presiding country of the 1998 CEI meeting, managed to organize the historical first economic fore of member countries of the initiative. The meeting, given its contents and orientation, has far overcome the past, mostly proclamatory, meetings of prime ministers and foreign affairs ministers.

The Slovak Republic, a regular participant to all CEI summits, has recently been very critical over the initiative's abandoning the economic cooperation issues in favour of tackling political questions, especially human rights and ethnic minority rights.

The return to the original objectives of the Central European Initiative, that was founded by Austria, Italy, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia in Budapest in 1989, was reaffirmed by the economic fore and its round table on foreign direct investment.

This return has not brought about major progress, yet it met its primary goal - economic potentials of individual countries were presented and opportunities for foreign investment were specified under one roof. The dicussions also proved that big shortage of capital is of more concern to the initiative than political scientific debates about the region's stability or honouring of human rights.

The representatives of the European Bank for Recovery and Development, and the World Bank who were the co-organizers of the economic fore, identified poor legislation and institutional framework to be the major hurdles for more impressive influx of investment into transition economies. The post-communist countries, they claimed, were wrong when thinking that transformation of economy, trade liberalization and state property privatization were enough to get close to European Union or investors. Western experts believe that the foundations of any integration and approximation to union depend on functioning financial institutions, harmonization and honouring of legislation. The question is how the Central and East European politicians and entrepreneurs percieve this philosophy. It can be assumed that this issue is likely to remain a problem for quite a time in CEI countries as well.

The economic fore culminated with a working meeting of ministers of economy and foreign trade, from which the representative of Belorussia was surprisingly absent. This meeting, however, was more of an informational than working nature as most of the present ministers did not keep to the topics of the agenda for discussions. No positions were given on important crucial CEI issues such as more extensive liberalization of trade or the future of regional free trade after the extension of the European Union. General information about the condition and development of national economies were dominating topics of the discussion.

The Slovak minister of economy Ľudovít Černák, whose participation in the Zagreb meeting was his first CEI meeting at the post of a new minister, suggested as one of few ministers, to continue implementing regional preference agreements in compliance with article 24 of the World Trade Organization in trade between the CEI countries. This article permits the WTO non-members to enter bilateral agreements on reduction of trade barriers, especially import quotas and duties. His motion was received with much understanding and most ministers accepted it, in particular those who were representing countries opposing the WTO membership or the "Brussels dictatorship".

This position was also reflected in the final joint statement of the ministers.

As for questions related to privatization, structural and macroeconomic reforms, the ministers asked the World Trade Organization, UN development agencies for "adequate support and understanding of specific needs" which are in the way of trade liberalization of eight CEI members - WTO non-members. They also expressed their hope that the extension of EU would foster trade between European countries, and they asked the Union for closer relationships within the framework of multilateral implementation of the existing agreements. Official responses of WTO or Brussels to the request letter of ministers are not known yet.

Slovak Trade FORUM