Agence France Presse - 04.16.2003

 

New Europe takes shape in Athens

ATHENS (AFP) Eight former members of the Soviet bloc and two Mediterranean islands signed treaties to join the European Union next year and reunite the continent a decade and a half after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

History hung heavy in the air as the leaders of the EU's 25 current and soon-to-be member states met in the shadow of the Acropolis in Athens, the birthplace of democracy, to sign the 5,000-page accession treaty.

Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson was the last leader to sign the hefty document, bringing to an end a two-hour ceremony in the Attalos Stoa, an ancient marketplace.

"It is only today that the Berlin Wall has truly fallen," Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said, 14 years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain allowed the newly liberated countries of the east to begin dreaming of EU membership.

If referendums and ratifications go without a hitch, the accession treaty will take effect on May 1, 2004, expanding the EU to 25 with the addition of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

"Today we open our arms to embrace and welcome these 75 million new European citizens," said European Commission president Romano Prodi.

"This is your home too now. It is yours to cherish, to make yourselves at home in, to dream in, to adorn, to extend even further," he said.

The EU is now set to expand to 450 million people, surpassing North America as the world's biggest economic zone.

But the new members will bring comparatively little to the table -- their collective gross domestic product is the same as the Netherlands', underlining the gulf that remains to be bridged between the old and new.

Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla, the first of the 10 accession country leaders to sign the treaty, said the occasion marked "the definitive end of a long, difficult and bloody chapter" in his country's history.

"This day is also the opening of a new chapter. We hold the future firmly in our hands," he said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the accession treaty was "a fundamental statement of unity here in Europe", after months of acrimony over Iraq.

"We welcome those countries from the east of Europe joining the European Union who struggled so long and so hard for their freedom from dictatorship and from repression," he said, in what appeared a pointed reference to the US-British war against Saddam Hussein.

The EU was deeply split by the war, and most of the accession countries made clear that their sympathies lay with Washington rather than with the anti-war camp led by France and Germany.

Alarmed at the prospect of violent protests against the war in Iraq, Greece launched its biggest-ever security operation for the showcase EU event. More than 10,000 policemen were deployed and much of central Athens shut down, including the historic Acropolis.

In the event, police made dozens of arrests as scuffles broke out during an anti-war march by young communists and anti-globalisation activists. But the turnout was estimated by police at just 3,000.

With debate intensifying on Iraq's reconstruction, the EU leaders issued an "Athens Declaration" in which they pledged to face up to "our global responsibilities" and to back the United Nations.

UN chief Kofi Annan, attending the treaty signing, said the EU was united behind a "multilateral approach" to resolving world crises, as Blair held fence-mending talks with counterparts including French President Jacques Chirac.

But the United States, after seeing off the Iraqi dictator, has made it clear it is unwilling to cast the reconstruction net too wide after the diplomatic wrangling that characterised the build-up to war.