Central Europe Leaders Meet Before EU Summit

The EU summit is expected to focus on efforts to better coordinate the response to the crisis, and avoid protectionism.

Leaders of European Union countries from central and eastern Europe will meet on March 1 to find common ground ahead of the bloc's emergency summit on the same day, diplomats said on Thursday.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has invited his counterparts from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia for the talks to ensure the 27-nation meeting on the financial crisis is not dominated by the interests of Western member states.

"We would like to send a message that even, or especially, at a time of crisis, the EU needs to preserve its rules of the single market and avoid protectionism," Poland's European affairs minister, Mikolaj Dowgielewicz told Reuters.

Some of the poorer central European countries that joined the bloc in 2004 and 2007 fear protectionism is on the rise in richer EU countries which can afford to spend billions of euros to shield their banks and industries from the crisis. French President Nicolas Sarkozy's suggestion this month that French car makers should move plants back home from the Czech Republic have stoked fears that France would pursue "beggar-thy-neighbour" policies to protect jobs.

The EU summit is expected to focus on efforts to better coordinate the response to the crisis, and avoid protectionism while trying to preserve jobs.

Dowgielewicz said it was still unclear if all the invited leaders would take part in the meeting.

The Czech Republic, which holds the EU's rotating presidency, said it was aware of a meeting of only four central European countries -- the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, which form the so-called Visegrad group.