East, west meet in the expanded EU

Veeramalla Anjaiah The Jakarta Post Jakarta

The 15-member European Union (EU), Europe's most powerful and prosperous grouping, is creating another milestone in its history on Saturday when its 12-starred blue flag sweeps aside the last vestiges of the Cold War and allows millions of Central and Eastern Europeans to formally rejoin the European family.

The eight Central and Eastern European (CEE) states -- Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania -- Cyprus and Malta, which have the fastest growing economies -- are joining the EU with the hope of a bright future.

The historic enlargement -- the fifth and biggest since 1973 -- from 15 to 25 member states represents the final lifting of the iron curtain and remains one of the greatest achievements of the grouping.

"Today, 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," wrote Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza's editor-in-chief Adam Michnik in the International Herald Tribune newspaper.

For most of the new member countries, who suffered from world wars, communism, totalitarianism and genocide for almost eight decades and separated from the Western Europe in the name of ideology, the entry is like another liberation (after the fall of communism in late 1980s) on one side and an opportunity to share the EU's goals of freedom, democracy and prosperity on the other.

French President Jacques Chirac commended the enlargement on Thursday as a giant step to make the EU a major economic power.

"By welcoming in the countries that have suffered most from the divisions of the past, the Union is a giant step. Because, with its 455 million inhabitants, the Union is asserting itself as a first-class economic power," Chirac said in Paris.

The new member countries, with a composite population of about 75 million people, speaking nine different languages (existing members have 11 languages) and GDP of US$320 billion, will reap benefits of joining a common market of 455 million people on Saturday.

Thanks to the EU's customs union, single market and single currency, the people, goods and services and money move around within the EU as freely as within one country. These freedoms are extended to the 10 newcomers on par with the existing members.

Despite the prospect of more aid and trade, the new members may not be getting the same benefits as Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece received when they joined the EU, given -- perhaps -- the new members' size, per capita income and unemployment rate.

The average per capita income of new members is $11,500 in compared to the EU-15's $25,200. The average unemployment rate of these newcomers is at 14.9 percent, compared to old members' unemployment rate of 8.2 percent

It is a fact that all these 10 countries are still poor, by EU standards. The eight CEE countries have an average GDP per head of about one quarter of today's EU average.

Though the road to the Enlargement Day or E-Day was difficult, the new countries, which are poorer than the existing members, finally made their dreams come true.

Because they had to change their thousands of rules and regulations, cut the budget for the existing welfare programs and subsidies with painful repercussions to meet the EU's rules and standards in a short span of time.

The EU has allocated 21.84 billion euros to help the newcomers prepare for accession, and 58.07 billion euros over five years to help meet the cost of enlargement after candidate countries have become member states.

The European Commission (EC), the executive arm of the EU, estimates that the present enlargement will add upto 1 percent extra growth each year for the newcomers during the first 10 years of their membership.

Besides strict criteria for admitting new members, the EU imposes obligations and duties as well as rights on its members. The members have an obligation to implement the EU rules which they adopted. The EC will monitor the implementation of the EU rules.

After the enlargement, perhaps, these former Soviet satellite states will be having, the Brussels-based fastidious bureaucrats or "Eurocrats" as their new bosses in place of their Moscow-based former bosses, Communists.

The regional groupings like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can learn from the EU experience and explore the idea of establishing a similar grouping in Asia. The enlarged EU can offer more opportunities for Indonesia, which has close ties with some of the new members for more than four decades, in terms of trade and investment.

The 25 members of the EU are all rather different, in their different ways including population, size, richness, language and culture.

These differences would pose a major challenge for the functioning of the EU and in the formulation of its policies.

Given the differences among the old and new members on various international issues, including Iraq issue, it would be very difficult to formulate a common foreign policy of the EU.

Yet, the EU -- which was originally started as a coal and steel community in 1951 -- had succeeded in unifying the divided Eastern and the Western parts of Europe and must look to the future to absorb the remaining European countries to create a united Europe that is strong and prosperous.