ROMANIA:The frequent recourse to diplomatic carrot and stick by Brussels is working wonders in Romania, writes Enda O'Doherty
On May 1st, 2004, the European Union, with as much fanfare and celebration as such an inherently unsexy organisation is ever able to muster, became a community, an association - or, as the anglocentric press agencies and europhobes everywhere like to call it, a "club" - of 25 nations.
In a few days that 25 will become 27 with the accession of Bulgaria and Romania. If this time around there will be little attempt at fanfare, that is not just because we are dealing with a more minor arithmetical progression: an expansion from 15 to 25 is obviously a much bigger deal than one from 25 to 27. It is also because of the considerable souring of the European atmosphere in the intervening years, which has seen both public opinion and the opinion of political elites in some of the EEC's founding members (most notably France and the Netherlands) falling out of love with the idea of an ever expanding union.
If the particular focus of this new scepticism has chiefly been Turkey, whose accession may - or may not - happen 12 to 15 years from now, all other new or aspiring members have also suffered.
In the years after 1989, the countries of formerly communist central and eastern Europe could count on a certain vague good will (tinged, perhaps, by occasional frissons of guilt) from informed public opinion in western Europe.
We had, after all, taken in Portugal, Spain and Greece when they had sloughed off their embarrassing right-wing authoritarian forms of government - and that in spite of the as always vociferous protests of French winegrowers fearful of competition.
We could scarcely then refuse the heroic peoples newly free so inspiringly represented in the public imagination by icons such as Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa. So, in due course, the countries of central Europe, left by the West to the tender mercies of Stalin after the Yalta conference of 1945, were welcomed back into the community of democratic, civilised and, hopefully, prosperous nations.
"Due course", lest we forget, was in fact 15 years, far too long and undignified a waiting period for an earnest intellectual champion of a reunited Europe like the British historian and commentator Timothy Garton Ash.
Garton Ash's perspectives were always predominantly political rather than economic: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the others simply were Europe and should be accepted as such; the boring old business of economic convergence could, and surely would, come later.
The grey men and women in the commission in Brussels perhaps felt they could not afford to adopt so intellectually generous a view, so the process took - well, as long as it took.
Central Europe, however, is one thing and "the Balkans", a fixture in the western imagination for well over a century, are another.
Slovenia, a small, forward- looking and quietly prosperous entity which thinks of itself as Alpine rather than Balkan, sneaked in in 2004 (and will adopt the euro on January 1st).
Romania and Bulgaria are not just further away, physically and mentally, from Brussels, Paris and Dublin, but were, in 1989, more economically retarded, and, in the case of Romania, had suffered an even more debilitating and traumatic form of oppression than the communist states of Mitteleuropa.
As the neo-Stalinist regimes expired one by one in central Europe in 1989 in a process made possible by the benign indifference of Mikhail Gorbachev, wise heads in Bucharest realised that the Romanian domino must also fall - or at least be seen to fall.
On Christmas Day the Ceausescus were hastily executed and their places taken by the "patriots" of the National Salvation Front.
The regimes which followed over most of the next 10 years were, however, arguably less concerned with a democratic transformation of economy and society than with a smooth transfer of wealth and power from the state to their newly privatised selves.
It has been only in the last few years that real progress has been made, but that progress has been both rapid and impressive.
Romania's road back to Europe has been a long and stony one, in which Brussels has had frequent recourse to both carrot and stick. As late as September this year the commission was still warning of the need for "sustained and, in certain areas, reinforced efforts".
It is not a pleasant experience to be in receipt of constant lectures and hectoring. It is scarcely good for one's self- esteem to be considered by some distant and superior entity as something like a donkey. But the old diet of carrot and stick is a staple of diplomacy and has often been known to work wonders.
Visiting Romania and meeting some of the actors, major and minor, in its transformation, it is impossible not to be impressed by their competence, confidence and idealism.
There is the city deputy mayor anxious to demonstrate the council's new electronic voting system, which will show any citizen who cares to attend in the chamber just who is voting yes and no to every proposal; the policemen of the organised crime and people-trafficking squads, where every second departmental head seems to be in his early 30s; the software entrepreneur who believes he is on the edge of his big break which will allow him to double his 1,000-person workforce; the director of the children's home who has seen the numbers in her care finally decline to a manageable level and whose rapport with the children is inspiring and clear to even the most cynical.
Romania's economy will grow by about 8 per cent this year. Its unemployment is about 5 per cent. It is still a poor country and a country with persistent problems inherited from its past.
Its brightest hope is that it seems to be eventually learning to trust its people.