"This is a great moment," insists Marek Grela, Poland's ambassador to the European Union. "It marks the final burial of the totalitarian era of the last century and a final end to the division of Europe." The ambassador's insistence on the historic nature of the decisions the European Union will make at its summit in Copenhagen on December 12th and 13th is appropriate―but also slightly plaintive. It has taken almost five years of tortuous negotiations to get to the point where the EU'S 15 current members are at last almost ready to strike a deal to admit ten new ones: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Cyprus and Malta. But the widespread assumption that the deal is all but signed has drained away much of the sense of occasion that would otherwise have attended the negotiations' final stages. Attention is already straying towards a country whose membership of the EU is still far from assured: Turkey. The fact that a deal on EU enlargement is now so dose is a tribute to both the determination of the candidate countries and the grinding efficiency of the EU'S negotiating machinery. As little as two years ago, it seemed implausible that as many as ten countries would really sign a deal at the end of 2002, allowing them to join the club in May 2004. To get to this stage, both sides have had to cut their way through a thicket of thorny issues, from the free movement of labour and capital to the enforcement of environmental rules and the regulation of state aid to industry.
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