European Union leaders toughened their tone towards aspiring new members on Thursday before a summit designed to reassure wary voters while keeping the door ajar to countries queuing to join.
The two-day summit comes after the 25-member bloc agreed on Monday to a partial freeze in Turkey's entry talks over its failure to normalise trade with Cyprus. The move papered over internal rifts over how to treat the mainly Muslim country.
Leaders will reaffirm backing for the eventual membership of Turkey, and the western Balkan states - Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.
But while welcoming Bulgaria and Romania into the bloc from January 1, they will insist that any further enlargement must await reform of the EU's creaking institutions - a process Germany aims to revive when it succeeds Finland as rotating president next month.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed the EU had to be tough in ensuring new entrants fully met membership criteria. "I am not saying this as a threat but as an incentive for countries who want to join and for the community," Merkel told the German parliament before heading for Brussels.
Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, whose own country joined the EU in 2004, denied the bloc was erecting new hurdles but told Reuters it would treat candidates more warily. "There's a different accent which is saying: 'Let's negotiate, let's fulfil all the conditions and afterwards we will deliver a (membership) date'," he said in an interview.
But Swedish Prime Minister Frederik Reinfeldt insisted the summit would "not close doors to anyone". "We are not writing maps of Europe, saying here is the border where it ends or something like that," he told Reuters.
Qualms over Turkey's EU bid were a factor in last year's "No" votes in France and the Netherlands to a constitution designed to revamp EU structures to welcome in further members after Romania and Bulgaria.
Romania celebrated its entry before the summit as President Traian Basescu and EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso were joined by flag-waving local children at a Brussels church.
The accession of those two states will complete a "big bang" expansion that began in 2004 when the EU admitted 10 mostly ex-communist central and eastern European countries that has since prompted a public backlash of "enlargement fatigue".
In a subtle linguistic shift, EU states will accept a duty to improve capacity to "integrate" new members and eschew the loaded term "absorption capacity", which states such as France and Austria had cited to try to erect roadblocks to Turkey.
Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel told reporters at a pre-summit meeting of conservative leaders just outside Brussels the partial freeze of talks with Ankara was a "clear warning" that it had to meet its obligations.
Turkey's backers, including Britain and Sweden, see the country as a vital link with the Muslim world and are playing down the impact on accession talks seen spanning over a decade.
Prospects for other hopefuls are by no means certain either. EU treaties must still be amended to allow any new members to join, but scepticism of institutional reform in a number of member countries means that Croatia, at the front of the queue, will likely have to wait until at least 2010 for entry.
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