Poland, 9 Other Nations Join European Union

By John Daniszewski

May 2, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

DUBLIN, Ireland —

With a burst of jubilation from Dublin to Lublin on Poland’s eastern frontier, 10 countries representing 75 million people joined the European Union on Saturday, a huge step in unifying a continent rent by war and totalitarianism in the last century and aspiring to be the model of peace and democracy for the new.

Fireworks lighted the skies in Ireland, host of the expansion ceremony. In Poland, whose 38 million people account for more than half the new citizens of the EU, people in the Tatra Mountains hacked down wooden barriers along the southern border and crossed into Slovakia without passports to mingle with their brethren.

The largest expansion in EU history included five formerly Communist east-central European states -- Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary; three ex-Soviet Baltic republics -- Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; and the Mediterranean island nations of Malta and Cyprus. (In Cyprus, only the Greek Cypriot southern half was admitted because a referendum that would have united the long-sundered island was defeated last week, leaving Turkish Cypriots on the outside -- even though they voted yes on the referendum.)

The surge of good feeling was especially strong in the former Communist countries, with Saturday the crowning moment in a long struggle to be recognized as part of Europe, rather than supplicants without claim to a share of the continent’s history and achievements.

“For 50 years, we observed from up close ‘history hung in chains.’ Today history is showing us a smiling and friendly face,” said Adam Michnik, a Polish political essayist and editor, in an article translated into English and published in the International Herald Tribune.

He hailed the union as a “denial of despotism,” writing: “This community, founded on the tradition of Athenian democracy, Roman law, Christian mercy and republican ideas of equality, freedom and brotherhood, is a zone of religious, political and cultural pluralism, which excludes despotic temptations.”

Michnik, one of the leading intellectual figures of the Solidarity movement, took part in the talks that ended the Communists’ monopoly on power in Poland. He urged that the EU continue to expand: “As the logic of the Iron Curtain finally disappears, we must do everything so that no other curtain arises on the eastern frontier of Poland and the EU. Let us remain open.”

The expansion of the EU from 15 to 25 member states took effect at midnight, with formal ceremonies and celebrations -- as well as some scattered protests -- taking place across Europe.

In Ireland, the centerpiece was a flag-raising ceremony late Saturday attended by 30 heads of government or heads of state, including new members and states seeking to join the EU in coming years.

Under a beautifully cloudless sky, schoolchildren from member states carried 25 national flags and the EU banner -- its dark blue field emblazoned with 12 gold stars in a circle of unity -- to their countries’ leaders. Military cadets raised the flags together to a choir’s singing of the European anthem: Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney read a poem he had composed for the occasion:

... So on a day when

newcomers appear

Let it be a homecoming and

let us speak

The unstrange word, as it

behooves us here,

Move lips, move minds and

make new meanings flare

Like ancient beacons signal-

ing, peak to peak,

From middle sea to north sea,

shining clear....

British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- who some believe has gambled his political career on Europe in recent days by agreeing to a referendum on whether Britain should adopt a European constitutional treaty -- praised the expansion. He said it would be “a catalyst for change within the EU” that would be “good for our security, for jobs and prosperity.”

But a poll published Friday in the Daily Telegraph newspaper showed how skeptical Britons are about the new constitution, on which officials hope to complete negotiations next month. The survey indicated that Britons would vote it down by a 2-1 margin if the election were held now.

Many Britons are fearful that a strengthened EU constitution would inevitably take power from national governments. Although Blair has promised that Britain would not cede control of its foreign policy, defense policy or borders, skeptics fear that is exactly what would happen.

Michael Howard, leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, told supporters recently: “We don’t want to be part of a country called ‘Europe.’ ”

At a news conference in Dublin Castle, both European Commission President Romano Prodi and the current president of the European Council, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, stressed the necessity of passing the new constitutional treaty so the EU can act more decisively.

Its governing structures are already unwieldy. The addition of 10 more members make it that much worse, and streamlining of decision-making will be essential, Prodi said.

“I honestly believe, and I think all my colleagues do, that we need to make changes and have an effective system to make decisions, to process the enormous, challenging issues that are always in front of us,” Ahern said.

Pat Cox of Ireland, current president of the European Parliament, spoke out against newspapers he accused of conjuring false images of floods of immigrants from poor states swamping more affluent EU countries.

“The only flood we have seen is a flood of tabloid ink and prejudice,” Cox asserted.

Prodi and Cox also took on suggestions that a unified Europe would be a counterbalance to U.S. domination of the world.

Cox said Europe is repeatedly chastised by Washington for doing too little militarily, and then criticized whenever it moves forcefully to set up its own defense structures.

“We share values, economic interests, and we are allies,” Cox said of the EU’s relations to Washington. “But alliance is not the same thing as allegiance.”

The EU began in 1950 as the European Coal and Steel Community, meant simply to coordinate industrial policy among six war-devastated economies of Western Europe. That evolved into the European Economic Community and, in 1979, the launching of a European Parliament.

The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 set the goal of monetary union, to be followed by political union. But many Europeans still dispute what that means.

Those seeking greater integration want the EU to evolve into a super-national structure that will speak with one voice on defense and foreign policy, field its own army, use a single currency and allow Europe to exert influence commensurate with its large share of the world’s economy.

Skeptics complain that the EU’s Brussels-based bureaucracy is inefficient, is riddled with corruption and suffers from unelected politicians attempting to create institutions and impose pan-European laws that citizens of EU countries don’t want or need.

The debate over the nature and structure of the EU, however, did not affect the desire of the 10 new members to join, or the hopes of states as far east as Russia and Georgia that they might follow one day.

“I fought for our country to recover everything it lost under communism and the Soviets ... and now my struggle is over,” the BBC quoted Lech Walesa, who led the workers’ strike at the Gdansk shipyard in 1981 and became modern Poland’s first freely elected president. “My ship has come to port.”

“Poles, Europeans -- welcome to a common Europe,” Walesa’s successor, President Aleksander Kwasniewski said, visibly touched after he hoisted the European flag Friday night at Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square, where Pope John Paul II in 1979 had held an open-air Mass during his first pontifical visit to Poland and -- many in Poland believe -- launched the train of peaceful revolutions that led to a reunited Europe.

Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who brokered the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Germany and east-central Europe, oversaw his country’s reunification and pursued a policy of friendship to the emerging democracies of the east, wiped tears from his eyes when he spoke Friday night at Zittau, the point where the Polish, Czech and German borders join.

“We want to honor the dead and tend the graves, but we don’t want any more soldiers’ graves in Europe,” said Kohl. “That is the most important reason for European unification.”

Writing in the Irish Times, Javier Solana of Spain, the EU’s senior foreign policy official, cited the progress his country has made in nearly 20 years of EU membership.

“I have no reason to believe it be otherwise for the 10 new member states,” he wrote. “Given the common objective to make Europe a continent of democracy, freedom, peace and prosperity, the union is proving to be a very attractive club, and the enlargement train shows no signs of slowing down.”

Romania and Bulgaria are due to join in 2007, and Croatia is nipping at their heels, meaning that much of the war-torn Balkan peninsula will be inside the EU in a few years. Farther to the east, Turkey’s application is also pending, although European opinion is divided over whether it can be considered part of Europe geographically and culturally.

But it was clear Saturday that the European dream is spreading. A map hung behind the press conference speakers showed the continent, from southernmost Malta to northernmost Sweden and from Latvia in the east to Spain in the west, as a solid bloc. The only exceptions were Switzerland, Norway and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, appearing as islands of beige in an ocean of EU blue.

Ela Kasprzycka of the Times’ Warsaw bureau contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

New union

The European Union, which started as six nations, marked its largest expansion yet, increasing by 10 countries.

Number of nations: 25

Population: 450.8 million

Population increase: 20%

Largest nation: Germany: 82.2 million

Smallest nation: Luxembourg: 435,000

Area: 1.5 million square miles

Area increase: 25%

EU GDP: $12 trillion