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. The countries of central and eastern Europe are and will, for a long time, be second class citizens, tolerated merely because they provide cheap, youthful, labor, raw materials and close-by markets for finished goods. The candidates are strategically located between the old continent and booming Asia. EU enlargement is a thinly disguised exercise in mercantilism tinged with the maudlin ideology of embracing revenant brothers long lost to communism. But beneath the veneer of civility and kultur lurk the cold calculations of realpolitik. The applicant countries - the EU's hinterland - would do well to remember this. Winning the European CAP By: Dr. Sam Vaknin Also published by United Press International (UPI) According to Herve Gaymard, the French resistance is alive and kicking - at least with regards to the European Commission's proposed reforms of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The French Minister for Agriculture, Food, Fisheries and Rural Affairs, in a speech to the misnamed "Real Solutions for the Future" Oxford Farming Conference last week, drew the battle lines.