ATHENS: The EU reached out beyond its expanding borders this week to call for closer relations with powerful neighbours such as Russia and Ukraine, both too big ever to join the club.
Just a day after ten new members, including eight former communist states from eastern Europe, signed their EU accession treaties, the Athens summit pledged an inclusive approach towards the rest of the continent.
Ending a ceremonial two days in the Greek capital, the 15 current members and the 10 newcomers endorsed a ringing declaration extending the hand of friendship and cooperation to 15 new neighbours.
The idea — known in Brussels jargon as “wider Europe” — is to prevent the emergence of new dividing lines across the continent once the EU’s biggest enlargement comes into effect next May.
Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Cyprus, and Malta signed their laboriously-negotiated accession treaties in the shadow of the Acropolis on Wednesday.
Shorn of the inevitable flattery and rhetoric, “wider Europe” is about avoiding a return to cold war divisions while refraining from raising unrealistic expectations that Ukraine, MolMoldova, Belarus or Russia could ever join.
All are either seen as too poor, too undemocratic, or simply too different to be part of a club which some founder members, such as France, feel is getting unmanageably big.
Wealthy states such as Iceland, Norway and Switzerland are also included in wider Europe, but are not the problem. The real issue is where the continent’s borders end.
An EU with 25 member states and a population of 450 million will stretch from Ireland to Estonia, and from Finland’s Arctic circle to Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean.
Others are already queuing. Bulgaria and Romania plan to join in 2007, while Turkey looks at 2005.
The most difficult problem is with Russia, angling for a special relationship with the union — like the one it already has with Nato — which may be formalized at the EU-Russia summit in St Petersburg next month.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
