European Union adds 10 nations to roster

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — The European Union expanded at midnight Friday to take in a region isolated during the Cold War, creating a 25-nation economic giant with the potential to rival the United States. Church bells rang and fireworks exploded over eastern Europe in celebration.

Ten countries joined the EU in a historic enlargement taking in a broad swath of the former Soviet bloc — a region separated for decades from the West by barbed wire and ideology — and widening to 450 million citizens.

Hundreds of thousands of jubilant revelers packed city squares in the newcomer nations, whose entry after overcoming tyranny 15 years ago was hailed by EU leaders as "the end of the artificial divisions of the last century."

The EU’s biggest expansion in its 47-year history brings in eight formerly communist countries — the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia — along with Cyprus and Malta.

Heads of state were gathering in Ireland, which holds the rotating EU presidency, for a formal "Day of Welcomes" in Dublin today.

"For me, it’s a great day," said Lenka Sladka, 24, a Prague university student. "Now we can freely travel or study everywhere. My parents could not even dream of it."

"It’s a day that we will read about in history books," said Eliza Malek, a 17-year-old celebrant in Warsaw, Poland.

Enlargement stirred strong emotions both in the "new" Europe — so dubbed by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, which most of the newcomers supported — and in the "old."

The EU flag — a circle of yellow stars on a blue field — went up Friday outside the presidential palace in Slovakia, where parliament speaker Pavol Hrusovsky delivered a stirring reminder of how far the country has come since shaking off communism.

"In 1989, we cut up the barbed wire. Pieces of this wire have for us become a symbol of the end of the totalitarian regime," he said. "For the generation which lived in captivity of the barbed wire, the EU means a fulfillment of a dream."

Enlargement signals a "completely new chapter" in relations between Germany and Poland that were blackened by the Nazi occupation, German President Johannes Rau said in a landmark speech to the Polish parliament.

In the German town of Zittau, "E-Day" festivities were held in a grassy meadow on the Neisse River where Germany meets Poland and the Czech Republic. Makeshift pontoon bridges, festooned with national and EU flags, were set up to link the three neighbors.

But the jubilation was tinged with frustration: fears in the newcomer nations of a loss of national identity and steep price increases, and worries in the EU’s core 15 member states of a crush of immigrants as national borders gradually disappear.

"Joining the EU is a necessary evil," said Zsolt Meszaros, 35, a Budapest doctor. "There are just too many uncertainties in all of this to make me more enthusiastic."

Enlargement was born of "centuries nourished by intolerance, conquests and war," European Commission President Romano Prodi told a ceremony at a town on the Slovene-Italian border.

In Hungary, where church bells nationwide tolled at midnight, an exuberant Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy hailed his country’s return to the European mainstream.

Hungary "was always at the gates of Europe," he said.

"The significant difference is that now we are inside the gates."