The new Europe takes shape

EU welcomes another 10 countries and 75 million more citizens

Thirteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe took its biggest and boldest gamble yesterday, paving the way for the former Communist countries of eastern Europe to join the EU in little more than a year.

This will be a big bang, which in terms of its scale and political ambition and danger dwarfs the three previous enlargements of the EU. If it succeeds, the European Union will have fulfilled its self-appointed mission to bring together the peoples of Europe.

If it fails, as it might, the achievements of the existing EU – including the single market – could be destroyed.

A more likely danger is that the 25-nation EU will become incapable of taking decisions and that a hard core of states, based on membership of the euro, will emerge as a union within the Union, from which Britain might yet be excluded.

The gambit should turn the EU, with 400 million people, into by far the largest political and economic player in the developed world. The cruel and arbitrary division imposed on Europe more than 50 years ago by war and ideology would be healed at last. By 2004 the new EU is expected to stretch from the Irish Sea to the Baltic coast and taking in territories that once fell under the iron fist of Communist dictators such as Stalin and Ceausescu.

The European Commission believed that it had no choice but to go for this mass enlargement. Any further delay in accepting countries that have already been waiting for democratic and economic recognition for 12 years might be disastrous.

Although EU heads of government still have to haggle over the finance before providing an official rubber stamp, the deal is practically done. Only another "no" next week in the Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty, which outlines changes needed to accommodate 10 more member states, can derail a move of historic proportions.

But neither the western European countries nor the eastern ones can really claim to be ready.

The existing 15 have yet to show the political will or imagination to take the decisions needed to allow a maxi-EU to operate sensibly on a day-to-day basis, let alone move forward. There is little true statesmanship in any European capital – not in Berlin, not in Paris, not in London – to match the enormity of the task ahead.

The club of six, forged in the hope of preventing France and Germany from ever going to war again, will be expanded from its current 15 countries to 25. The members include eight former Communist countries – Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia – plus the islands of Cyprus and Malta. Two economic and political laggards, Romania and Bulgaria, are officially in the ante-chamber.

Yesterday in Brussels the EU leaders oscillated between exuberance and concern at the implications of a political leap in the dark. Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, looked back 13 years when Berlin was, he said, "still divided by a wall of shame". Now, he told the European Parliament, "we have rediscovered a historic unity between all our peoples. Our common destiny is to build our future together."

The candidate countries are still suffering from the economic and political consequences of having been severed from the rest of Europe for so long.

Problems there certainly are. The EU has managed three expansions before – from six to nine to 12 and finally 15 – but never anything on this scale. Admitting 10 countries in one go poses the huge risk that the EU's already sclerotic decision-making process will simply seize up.

Even basic administration will be slowed when the Commission has to translate legal decisions not into its existing 11 official languages but into Estonian, Hungarian and Polish too. Meeting rooms will have to be expanded and speaking limits imposed on more garrulous politicians. Jobs will have to be found for European Commissioners from the new member states.

Then there is the economic challenge of absorbing 10 nations whose total gross domestic product is equivalent to that of the Netherlands, a medium-sized fish in the EU pond. But was there another option? The EU could not delay the unification of the continent again. The danger is that the European governments – of both east and west – will not prove themselves capable of making the difficult decisions, and sacrifices, needed to unite the continent at last.