LJUBLJANA: European integration takes a giant leap forward when eight former communist eastern and central European countries are invited to join the EU in Copenhagen.

But enthusiasm in the east for the EU has given way to a sense of resignation and bitterness at the terms of entry.

In admitting Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, Brussels seems to be importing a large slice of Euroscepticism which may transform the way it functions.

“There’s no great love here for the EU,” says Juri Gustincic, Slovenia’s veteran foreign affairs commentator. “No real emotional acceptance. This is a rational decision.”

The Nato summit in Prague and the meeting in Copenhagen represent the successful conclusion to a decade of east European foreign policy making: Prague extended Nato to the Baltic and the Black Sea, while Copenhagen pushes the EU to the gates of St Petersburg and the Balkans.

But there is no euphoria over the May 2004 entry date.

“Back in the early 90s we thought it would take a few years,” says Julius Horvat, head of European studies at the Central European University in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. “No one imagined it would take us 15 years.”

Among eastern European elites, there is a strong sense that their western counterparts have blown a great chance to re-energize the EU project, and they bitterly remember the litany of broken promises.

“The whole process has been too long and too technocratic,” says Jakub Boratynski, European studies director at the Batory institute, a Polish thinktank. “We’ve lost sight of the big picture, which is fundamentally political and nothing less than the reunification of Europe. It all looks rather sad, the whole thing is marred by the stingy and selfish approach of the west Europeans.”

Back in the 90s, Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl famously told the Poles that they should be in the EU by 2000. Kohl also endlessly intoned that German and European unification were the two sides of the same coin. German unification took just 10 months.

And as budget negotiations go down to the wire in Copenhagen over the next 48 hours, Brussels has shaved $2 billion off the kitty offered to cover the cost of enlargement.

Western leaders complain about the estimated $40 billion bill for enlargement, but easterners point out that it is about 10 per cent of the cost of German unification.

“The petty haggling’s all very predictable,” says Jose Mencinger, university rector in the Slovene capital, Ljubljana. “But the west is not very eager on enlargement. It’s not very important to them economically and through liberalisation and market opening they’ve already got the access they want.”

All the newcomers have their gripes, from Polish farmers irate that they will gain one dollar in subsidies for every four doled out to their French counterparts, or Slovenia feeling penalized for its own success and fearing it will have to pay more into the Brussels pot than it gets back.

But the broader disaffection is grounded in the widespread feeling that the newcomers are being given second-class status and having the terms dictated by the more powerful west.

History is more of a live force in eastern Europe than in the west, and Munich 1938 and Yalta 1945 are burned into the psyches of Czechs and Poles. Prague and Copenhagen should counter Munich and Yalta, yet eastern Europeans feel unwanted and shabbily treated.

For all of the newcomers, the fragility and youth of their independent democracies compound the ambivalence. They are wary of surrendering sovereignty so soon after liberating themselves from others.

As the most prosperous and economically developed, the Slovenes and the Czechs in particular are suspicious of forfeiting the independence they cherish.

While the opinion polls indicate comfortable majorities in favour of EU membership among all the newcomers except Estonia, analysis shows that both Czechs and the Slovenes expect to gain less from membership and have less faith in Brussels.

“People here and in Prague know that not everything is going to get better in the EU. And they know there will be a lot of losers,” says Jana Novak, a Slovene pollster.

The pro-European governments in the east are already worried about a backlash and are making moves to ensure victory in the EU referenda over the next six months.

The sense that the east Europeans are being admitted only grudgingly is helping the anti-Brussels movements.

With a population and market as big as the other seven newcomers combined, Poland is both by far the biggest asset and the biggest problem for Brussels. Its referendum could be boisterous, and close. The worried government is already engineering a situation where the issue will be settled by parliament and not by the people.

“The Poles are stirring,” says Prof Horvat. “And they are the only big nation in the region with proud ambitions and a claim on a strong position in the EU.”

Because of their clout, the Poles will be the toughest hagglers in Copenhagen but will, the pundits predict, accept the EU’s terms even if that stores up problems for the future at home. The others, too, will knuckle under because they feel they have no choice.

The bigger failures are of the imagination, say the east Europeans, and of west European leadership, selling the whole process not as “Europe’s reunification” but as the “EU’s enlargement”.

“It could have been a fiesta,” says Boratynski in Warsaw. “Instead we’re all ambivalent. It’s now a rather gloomy situation.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.