EU frets over the expense of expansion

BRUSSELS - The European Union's drive to add countries from the Soviet bloc has been painted as a moral imperative, the return to the Western fold of lands unfairly cut off from democracy by the vagaries of history.

It has even earned the EU a nomination for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet, despite the sense of history-in-the-making, enthusiasm has begun to wane among some in the West as noble quest shifts to costly reality just weeks away.

"I would say this is the moment of truth for Europe," says former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, who cataloged the "challenges" of the expansion in a report last year. "In my somber moments, I'm somewhat pessimistic about what's happening."

Relatively speaking, this won't be the EU's biggest bang. The entry of Britain, Ireland and Denmark in 1973 brought in proportionally more people. Austria, Sweden and Finland added proportionally more land in 1995.

And the combined economic output of the 10 new entrants - $548-billion in 2002 - is roughly equal to that of little Holland. They will boost the EU's gross domestic product by less than 5 percent.

But never before have economic differences between new and old been so stark for the EU. So fears are rising in the West about floods of migrants seeking jobs and generous benefits - even as more businesses decamp to the cheaper, less-developed East.

The panic has stirred such pique in the incoming nations that Margot Wallstrom, acting EU employment commissioner, pleaded this month for cooler heads.

"There is a responsibility on all of us to make sure this does not turn ugly," she said.

On May 1 - 15 years after the Iron Curtain's fall - Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia shed the lowly "candidate" status and become full-fledged EU members, along with the island states of Cyprus and Malta.

Enlargement will add 75-million consumers, creating a single market of 450-million people, compared with NAFTA's 420-million, and give the EU a GDP bigger than the United States'.

The Europeans also hope greater breadth will translate to greater clout in global affairs.

Yet the strains of reorganizing a rich, comfortable club of 15 nations are showing.

"Old Europe" sniped at the scrappy, pro-American easterners over Iraq last year. That was followed by stalemate in the effort to streamline the EU's decisionmaking with its first constitution.

Now western governments are fretting about bread-and-butter issues like jobs and budget deficits, worries exacerbated by the lingering economic doldrums across a continent desperate to catch up with America's better growth and productivity.

Average per capita GDP in the countries joining is only about 40 percent of the EU's current level, which is barely 60 percent of the U.S. level - down from around 70 percent a decade ago.

With average unemployment in the West stuck at 8 percent - closer to 10 percent in Germany and France - all but two EU governments have thrown up barriers to keep eastern Europeans from working in their countries for up to seven years.

Britain and Ireland will let easterners work but bar them from welfare for at least two years - and they might remove the right to work if there is turmoil in their labor markets.

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