Financial Times (London, England)
September 27, 2006 Wednesday
London Edition 1

Door swings shut behind new boys as EU’s welcome is exhausted ‘Old
Europe’ will need to recover from enlargement fatigue before more
countries join the club of 27, writes George Parker

By GEORGE PARKER

Bulgaria and Romania may be coming in to the European Union but the
door is starting to swing shut behind them.

The accession of the two Black Sea states completes the "big bang"
expansion of the EU, which began in 2004 with eight former communist
countries in central and eastern Europe.

The healing of Europe’s cold war divisions was a relatively easy
political message for western leaders to sell but each new round of
enlargement takes the EU into ever more difficultterrain.

"You could sell the Czech Republic, Hungary or Poland joining," says
a senior EU official involved in the enlargement process. "People
knew about the Prague Spring or Budapest 1956 or Solidarity.

"With Bulgaria and Romania it is more difficult to make the case on
an emotional level, and it’s going to keep getting harder."

According to a Euro-barometer opinion poll this year, some 53 per
cent of EU citizens viewed enlargement with "indifference, fear,
annoyance or frustration", even if a narrow majority – 55 per cent –
still felt positive about the process.

The symptoms of enlargement fatigue became glaringly obvious last
year when French and Dutch voters rejected the EU constitution, with
No voters citing the club’s eastward expansion as a prime reason for
their dissatisfaction.

For France, the expansion diluted the original essence of a western
club of relatively wealthy countries largely operating under the
political direction of Paris. Other founder members fear that the EU
has grown too big, too fast.

For the Dutch, migration was a big factor, as it now is in Britain
(which was traditionally one of the biggest supporters of
enlargement). The arrival of up to 600,000 east European workers in
the UK between May 2004 and June this year outweighed anything the
British government or European Commission had predicted.

Although new EU members in central and eastern Europe have taken
enormous strides since the fall of communism, recent political
developments have reinforced the fears of sceptics in "old Europe".

Poland’s ruling party has been accused of populist nationalism,
Slovakia’s new coalition has been criticised for fanning xenophobia
and Hungary’s prime minister provoked demonstrations when he admitted
he had lied to win a general election.

Bulgaria and Romania’s failure to tackle organised crime and
corruption fully or to prepare their admin-istrative systems to
handle billions of euros of EU aid has done little to build
confidence.

Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, insists
enlargement benefits both old and new member states. "An enlarged
Europe counts for more when we speak with China or Russia than
before," he said.

But he concedes Europe needs a pause before adding to a club of 27,
whose population will approach 490m people. In particular, he says it
would be "unwise" to expand the Union further before it upgraded its
creaking institutions, through the ratification of parts of the EU
constitution.

The accession of Bulgaria and Romania is a natural break point. Only
Croatia and Turkey have already started membership talks: the former
is unlikely to be ready to join before 2011 at the earliest, the
latter’s progress towards the EU will be tortuous and may not achieve
its goal.

>From now on, the going gets tough. Bulgaria and Romania may have been
poor (both had GDPs of 31 per cent the EU average in 2004) but other
potential newcomers in the western Balkans – Serbia, Montenegro,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia – will be even
harder and more costly to absorb. And, like Turkey, they carry heavy
political baggage. While all of those countries have at least had
their "membership perspective" recognised by the EU, others on the
fringes face a long spell in the cold. Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and
Armenia may have to wait many years before the symptoms of
"enlargement fatigue" in the EU start to subside.