ON November 10th Poland and the EU finally took the step to open formal negotiations on accession. The real game is on. Until now it's all just been preliminaries, a courting ritual. Now the member states are sitting down formally with Poland to agree the terms of the marriage.

It started with a "Europe Agreement" which came into force in 1994 followed in April that year by the formal application for membership.

In July last year the Commission published its "avis" on Polish accession, the detailed assessment of the country's readiness for membership which put it in the six front-runners with whom accession talks would begin.

The report gave Poland a clean bill of health on its democratic credentials, accepted that a functioning market economy was in place and that it would be able to withstand the competitive pressures of membership and take on board the full requirements of membership "provided that it maintains the pace of restructuring".

Early this year the avis was turned into an "accession partnership" agreement which spelled out the short and medium-term priority challenges required to bring the country into line with EU practice.

Their reform programme, the Poles say, is based on completing the full requirements for membership by the end of 2002 with the hope of acceding in 2003. That is also the working assumption of the Commission, says EU Ambassador to Poland, Rolf Timans.

They reject suggestions from some member states and, reportedly, though he has denied it from the commissioner responsible for enlargement, Hans van den Broek, that a more realistic date is 2005. The lengthy process of "screening", the cumbersome listing by the Commission and the candidate country of the legislative, economic and administrative realities on the ground, has been under way for some months. Seven of the 31 policy areas have been covered - by and large the easy ones, with giants like agriculture and the environment only just starting.

In parallel, the refocusing of the Union's Phare programme of financial assistance has been started. Since 1990 Phare has pumped some £1.2 billion into the Polish economy - now aid has been made specifically conditional on and targeted at the accession challenges enumerated in the partnership agreement.

Some 30 per cent will be aimed at institution-building to ensure not only that EU legislation is transposed but that Poland has the administrative capacity to implement the huge range of changes required - the Union's collected regulations and administrative practises run to some 80,000 pages, all of which have to be transposed and be implemented.

Extensive training of officials includes placements in the member states' own administrations and Ireland is about to take another group of 15 Polish officials into various departments.

The balance of Phare funding will go to investment in enterprises and infrastructure to help the transition.

The partnership agreement sets out the key short-term priorities for 1998 as:

Economic reform - acceleration of privatisation/restructuring of state industry and sound development of the financial system.

Adoption of reform plan for steel.

Reinforcement of administrative capacity, particularly customs, state aid controls, veterinary services, external border controls.

Internal market - further alignment of standards, of rules on intellectual property and public procurement, liberalisation of capital movements

New border arrangements with Belarus and Ukraine.

Agriculture - adoption of new rural development policy, improvement of hygiene and testing standards, transposition of regulations.

Environment - continue legislative transposition and development of implementation strategies.

In each category there has been very significant progress although the viability of the farm reform programme has been questioned. A progress report from the Commission in preparation as we go to press and due out in early November, is expected to reflect well on the work in hand.

Timans pays tribute to the energy and commitment of the Polish reform programme and the broad political consensus that drives it. The "return to Europe" is seen, he says as a unique opportunity after 200 years of domination to re-establish a national identity, a perception that has helped the people go through "a deep valley" after the overthrow of communism.

THE country's remarkable growth is sustainable, he says, if the EU economy is not involved in a substantial downturn, as is the progress on prices that has brought down inflation to single-digit figures from 30 per cent only three years ago. But he accepts that it is too much to expect Poland to join the single currency immediately on accession.

He accepts that the most difficult element of the talks will be agriculture where the EU will certainly be looking for transitional arrangements after accession. The Union will also certainly allow Poland some time to bring its environmental standards up to EU levels. But in the end there is no question of any permanent derogations from standard EU practice.

There are still some doubts, Timans says, about the country's administrative capacity to manage the transition, even at the highest level, and he is not convinced that the co-ordination structures, now run by the prime minister, "have assumed their final shape".

He rejects criticism of the pace of privatisation and restructuring but warns that difficult ones are still to come - the national airline, LOT, steel and coal. Telecomunikacja Polska shares went on sale last month.

Although he acknowledges that pressure will come on Poland to accept transition periods on free movement of workers into the rest of the EU, he says that fears of a mass exodus are "quite exaggerated". Ultimately, and particularly given the strength of the economy, "Poles want to live and work in Poland".