SEVILLE, June 22: European Union leaders said on Saturday they were determined to stick to their timetable for the bloc’s historic enlargement eastwards, and hoped 10 countries would finish entry talks this year.

“There is no change whatsoever to the timetable,” European Commission President Romano Prodi told a news conference winding up a two-day summit in this southern Spanish city.

But he warned that “there will be a lot of work to be done to meet that deadline.”

The new sign of determination to expand the bloc on time came as reassurance to Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, which the EU previously said are capable of wrapping up talks this year and entering in 2004.

On Saturday, however, the leaders avoided naming countries, saying enlargement would go ahead “with those who are ready.”

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who hosted the summit, said the enlargement process “has been given a tremendous fillip” by the leaders.

But despite leaders’ determination, the EU faces a tight deadline and has left the most prickly questions, which involve money and who pays what, to the end.

To join the club, applicant countries must enact painful economic reforms after years of central planning, put thousands of pages of EU legislation into statute books and reform creaking communist-era judiciaries and civil services.

The EU and candidate countries must also get to the heart of negotiations on agriculture, the most difficult part of the enlargement discussions. Talks are expected to be particularly tough with Poland, which has a massive farming sector.

Many member states are unlikely to agree to let expansion go ahead if Poland is not on board, so a delay in talks with Warsaw would be likely to delay the entire process.

At the summit, EU leaders promised to put all the cards on the table by early November in order to make it possible to conclude the negotiations on time.

Aznar said that once concluded, the countries’ accession treaties should be drawn up as quickly as possible and signed in early 2003, allowing countries to cross the EU threshold by mid-2004.

The leaders also had encouraging words for Romania and Bulgaria, two impoverished ex-communist states in southern Europe which are considered to be lagging too far behind in their preparations to join as early as the others.

“We are all very much aware of the efforts they are engaged in,” Aznar said.—AFP