European Union leaders pledged today to step up the pace of eastward enlargement and vowed joint action to prevent any repetition of anarchist riots that scarred their Swedish summit.
The 15 leaders set a target date of end-2002 for concluding entry negotiations with the most advanced candidates from former communist and Mediterranean countries. That should enable the first wave to join the bloc by 2004.
"We have been able to bring the harvest home in terms of a fixed date and a fixed timetable for new memberships of the European Union," Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said.
Central European leaders hailed the carefully qualified EU statement as an important step forward.
"This is a very important signal that the EU does not slow down the pace of enlargement and that negotiations will be dynamic," Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek told a news conference after a lunch of EU and candidate states' leaders.
The wording left the onus on applicant states to make the necessary reforms to qualify, but it reassured them that the enlargement process remained on track despite Ireland's shock rejection of the EU's Nice Treaty in a referendum last week.
After talks with President Bush on Thursday, the EU leaders also pledged stronger action to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, and pleaded for Israel and the Palestinians to use a "window of opportunity" for peace offered by a fragile cease-fire.
Mr Persson said he was relieved to announce the enlargement deal, crowning his six-month EU presidency after a summit marked by the most serious civil disorder in Sweden's recent history.
One protester was in critical condition in hospital after being shot by a policeman yesterday. Two others sustained less serious gunshot wounds during a methodical rampage by hundreds of masked anti-globalization militants.
The leaders of Sweden, France and Belgium instructed their foreign and interior ministers to recommend measures to avert a recurrence of violence that has dogged international gatherings since a 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
Mr Persson called Friday's 12-hour riot a tragedy and told a news conference: "It is something we have never seen in Sweden before....If we fail to take joint action, then they've won and they are not democrats, they're criminals."
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said his government would check the legal possibility of barring political rioters from traveling, as happens with convicted soccer hooligans.
Swedes reacted with stunned dismay to the orgy of destruction, which overwhelmed the libertarian country's police force, barred from using teargas and water cannon.
Central Gothenburg looked like a war zone during the rampage by anarchists from Denmark, Germany, France and Sweden.
Dozens of people, including 12 policemen, were injured. Swedish television showed a policeman drawing his gun and firing as rioters attacked a defenseless colleague on the ground.
Mr Persson said his government would review legislation to give police a freer hand in future. "I don't find it reasonable, and having seen this, we have to be a little bit more realistic about the world we are living in," he said.
Gothenburg police chief Hakan Jaldung said Sweden had declared a temporary exemption from the EU's Schengen open-border accord to reimpose frontier controls.
A coachload of 100 Germans suspected of planning violent action were held on arrival. Of 593 people detained yesterday 96 were still under arrest, eight on suspicion of serious crimes.
A third day of protests by about 20,000 anti-capitalist activists passed off peacefully after they were re-routed away from the heavily guarded conference complex and the city center.
Seeking to reassure the 12 negotiating candidate states and Turkey, the EU said: "The enlargement process is irreversible.
"Provided that progress toward meeting the accession criteria continues at an unabated pace, the road map should make it possible to complete negotiations by the end of 2002 for those candidates that are ready," the statement said.
France and Germany had resisted fixing dates, stressing the pace of negotiations depended on each applicant's merits. But Mr Schroeder said he had not wanted to block an agreement in the aftermath of the Irish vote.
The Taoiseach, Mr Bertie Ahern said Ireland needed an "extended period of reflection" after last week's 54-46 per cent defeat of the treaty negotiated last December to reform EU institutions to cope with new members.
Most diplomats expect a fresh Irish vote next year after some EU reassurance on neutrality.
After talks with Mr Bush at NATO and in Gothenburg, the EU leaders pledged to tighten export controls and urged a "global and multilateral approach" to curbing the spread of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.
Several European allies, especially France and Germany, are uneasy about Mr Bush's plans for an anti-missile shield and would prefer to counter emerging threats with a mixture of arms control, export restrictions, diplomacy and deterrence.
The leaders said the EU should play a leading role in these efforts and vowed to forge a common position among the 15 member states on a global code of conduct, which they said could lead "in due time" to the convening of an international conference.