UE si "strainatatea apropiata" - Guardian
Expanding union woos Russia
'Wider Europe' plan seeks to pacify those left outside club
Ian Black, european editor
Friday April 18, 2003
The Guardian
The EU reached out beyond its expanding borders yesterday 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 10 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.
"This is our vision of Europe," Romano Prodi, the European commission's president, said. "Europe has not enlarged in a spirit of egoism and exclusion. It is enlarging by offering its neighbours closer ties of neighbourhood."
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, Moldova, 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 queueing. Bulgaria and Romania plan to join in 2007, while Turkey is aiming to start long-delayed entry talks in 2005 - if it meets EU standards on human rights and democracy.
Croatia has also applied to join and the EU has told other countries of the former Yugoslavia, including Serbia and Albania, that they too will one day be welcome.
"Europe is more than geography," said Dennis MacShane, Britain's Europe minister. "It is an idea and set of values that raise the democratic, human rights and economic game from the Atlantic to the Urals."
Yesterday's declaration included a pledge to promote trade and investment, open up markets, fight organised crime and terrorism, build up energy and transport networks and respect human rights.
Mr Prodi said the EU wanted to offer its neighbours all the benefits of membership, short of voting rights and full participation in its institutions.
The Greek prime minister Costas Simitis, the summit host, said: "Athens is the basis for new steps to see what we can do to make sure that Europe, despite all the differences, can work together to achieve peace and prosperity."
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 formalised at the annual EU-Russia summit in St Petersburg next month.
The Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, who was also in Athens, yesterday invited the leaders of both the current and future EU states to the summit.