Thirteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall eight formerly communist states have sufficiently transformed their political systems, economies, administrative systems and cultures to warrant accession to the European Union, the European Commission asserted yesterday.
The Commission's verdict on the eight - Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Slovenia - and its green light to Cyprus and Malta, are a tribute to extraordinary, often painful, efforts in all of the applicant states to transpose the 80,000 pages of EU laws and administrative practices that a new member must sign up to. Above all, it is testimony to the strength of the European vocation of peoples convinced that their democratic revolutions will remain incomplete as long as they are outside the EU.
Such efforts should be acknowledged and rewarded with generosity by speedy accession.
The Commission also set 2007 as a target accession date for Romania and Bulgaria. It failed, to Ankara's disappointment but not surprise, to concede Turkey's hope to get a start-date for its negotiations.
But the door is not quite open yet for the ten. Some difficult questions remain. On October 24th, EU heads of government will meet in Brussels to complete the Union's negotiating position on such issues as farm payments, regional funds, and how to ensure that none of the new members start out as net budget contributors. By December's Copenhagen summit the talks should be complete, allowing EU leaders formally to approve accession which will then have to be approved by individual member-states and acceding countries to allow accession from the start of 2004.
That schedule is extremely tight and is certain, at a minimum, to be seriously compromised, if Ireland votes No. Yesterday both the Commission President, Mr Romano Prodi, and the Danish Presidency warned of the crisis that would result from a plunge into such uncharted waters.
An ingredient of a "Plan B" to meet such an eventuality is the idea reported today by The Irish Times - that the Dáil could be asked to give a political endorsement of enlargement. But, although such a declaration might well provide the political impetus to begin the process of picking up the pieces, it would not in itself provide a mechanism for rebuilding the delicate consensus among the 15 on which Nice was based. Nor does it suggest how the Amsterdam constraints on enlargement beyond five could be overcome.