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  • New Europe's leaders want a new enlargement to the east

    EU Business, UK
    April 4 2004

    New Europe's leaders want a new enlargement to the east


    Only a few weeks away from joining the European Union, the so-called
    New Europe's leaders are already dreaming of expanding the EU even
    further to the east, to Ukraine, Belarus and perhaps Georgia.

    The former Soviet bloc states set to join the EU on May 1, and
    considered the New Europe, want to use their new status to lead a
    debate on the Union's future borders, a debate existing members shy
    from.

    "If you look at the map, you'll see that Ukraine and Belarus are part
    of Europe and I can't see why we would refuse to others what was
    generously granted to us", Estonian foreign minister Kriistina
    Ojuland told journalists.

    Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski has said repeatedly that the
    EU must remain open to new members, particularly his country's
    neighbours Belarus and Ukraine.

    Former Czech president Vaclav Havel agrees.

    Sensitive to the fate of opponents to Belarus President Alexander
    Lukashenko's regime, Havel, himself a former dissident, has demanded
    that the EU offer Belarus's fighters for democracy a chance of
    joining Europe, as the Union did for former communist countries in
    central Europe.

    "I believe that the future of Belarus is firmly linked with the
    future of Europe", Havel said only last week. "The door must remain
    open."

    Meanwhile, Bulgaria and Romania, which hope to join the EU in 2007,
    want to see the Union push further east, namely to include Turkey, a
    candidate for membership since 1999, and the impoverished Moldova.

    Bulgaria and Romania are also looking at their neighbors across the
    Black Sea.

    Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy has pleaded enthusiastically
    on behalf of Georgia and Armenia. In his mind, the Black Sea would
    become an internal sea within the European Union.

    "From a strategic perspective, the Black Sea region is part of
    Europe", Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase told a conference in
    Bratislava in March.

    "The EU can make a new success-story of the Black Sea-Caucasus
    region," Nastase said.

    These aspirations are strongly supported by US conservatives, such as
    the influential Bruce Jackson, who acted in the wings last year to
    ensure the support of New Europe for the Iraqi policy of George Bush.


    These conservatives are hostile to a European federation which would
    rival the United States but would like to have the EU function as an
    instrument of economic and political stabilisation for the former
    Soviet Bloc countries.

    Above all, the new members are worried that remaining the easternmost
    countries of the EU would leave them stuck with borders that isolate
    them economically from their eastern neighbors.

    There is also a real solidarity among the former Soviet republics.

    "When I see how these countries are increasingly deprived of the
    simple perspective of EU membership ... it's terrifying," said the
    father of Lithuania's independence Vytautas Landsbergis.

    The new countries will however have to be strong to convince others.
    More than one year ago Romano Prodi, president of the EU's executive
    arm, the European Commission, drew the future map of the EU --
    integrating Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and the Balkan countries but
    saying that others would have to remain "friends".

    And to hear the increasingly strong voices rising in western Europe
    against Turkey joining, it is not certain the future EU map will be
    even as large as that envisioned by Romano Prodi.

    The 10 states set to join the EU on May 1 are Cyprus, the Czech
    Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland,
    Slovakia and Slovenia.
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