Europe stood proudly reunited on Saturday almost six decades after it was split in two by the Cold War, as 10 nations in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean took their places in the European Union.
The once-communist states of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia officially joined the EU family at the stroke of midnight Central European summer time (2200 GMT Friday).
Mediterranean islands Cyprus and Malta joined them as well, rounding out what is indisputably the world's biggest single trading entity, with a total population of 455 million.
The European Union thus enters into a new and uncharted era, five decades after it rose out of the trauma of World War II as a force for peaceful partnership between France, Germany Italy and the Benelux nations.
"For Europe, today marks the closure of one chapter and the opening of another new and exciting chapter in its long history," said Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern after Christian, Jewish and Muslim prayers were said in Dublin for the bigger union.
"Size matters," added European Commission President Romano Prodi. "The enlarged union... can achieve far more than individual countries could ever hope to achieve separately."
Spectacular firework displays lit up the night sky across the new Europe as Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," the triumphant EU anthem, rang out at the start of a weekend of celebrations in eastern capitals.
The 25 national flags of the expanded EU were to be unfurled on Saturday in Dublin at a ceremonial welcome given by the EU's Irish presidency for assembled heads of state and government.
"Five decades after our great project of European integration began, the divisions of the Cold War are gone once and for all and we live in a united Europe," Prodi said in a statement.
The new members had already begun to party hours before the midnight "big bang" - although the enlargement was clouded by the failure of Cyprus to join as a unified island.
Poland, by far the biggest of the 10 newcomers, hoisted the starred blue EU flag at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Warsaw.
"Welcome to a united Europe," President Aleksander Kwasniewski said. "Dreams are becoming a reality."
In Prague, on a stage bedecked with EU flags, Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla called EU accession "the end of a long and difficult journey" that began with the Prague Spring rebellion against Soviet domination in 1968.
People in the three Baltic states burst into song to celebrate joining the EU, 14 years after their so-called Singing Revolution of passive resistance against Soviet subjugation.
Few sites were more emblematic of Europe's far-reaching changes than the shared border between Austria, Italy and Slovenia, where officials of the three countries gathered Friday for a mountain-top celebration.
In contrast, festivities in western Europe were more measured, although Germany feted the enlargement by turning Berlin's Brandenburg Gate - scene of jubilant scenes in 1989 when the Wall came down - into one large beer garden.
The map of the new Europe now stretches to the borders of Russia and Ukraine, as well as Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey - the latter all official candidates to join the bloc.
Ireland went all out to celebrate on Saturday, hosting a "Day of Welcomes" in Dublin and in 10 other towns and cities each twinned with an EU newcomer.
Irish police laid on a huge security operation, however, fearful of May Day protesters who see the European Union as a Trojan horse for profit-greedy big business.
Many tough issues still face the enlarged EU, however, not least the yawning economic disparity between east and west, and the completion of an EU constitution to keep the bloc's decision-making from seizing up.
In the west, enlargement has brought fears of a influx of eastern European workers, while in the east, many worry about job losses and eurocrats in Brussels lording it over their hard-won national sovereignty.
Amid such fears, it was left to former German chancellor Helmut Kohl - who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall and national reunification - to put enlargement into context.
"No one hoped 50 years ago that we would be at this point. That is why it is above all necessary, for all the worries that this day also brings with it, that we say loudly and clearly we are investing in the future," Kohl said.
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