With a blaze of fireworks and street celebrations, the EU threw open its gates to 10 new members yesterday, reuniting a continent scarred by decades of Cold War conflict.
Hundreds of thousands thronged open-air parties, concerts and border ceremonies from the Atlantic to the Baltic and the Mediterranean as political leaders hailed the final closing of Europe's east-west divide, 15 years after the Berlin Wall fell.
PHOTO: EPA
Star-studded blue EU flags were hoisted in eight central and eastern European states that endured decades of Soviet-dominated communist rule, and on the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Malta, which join the wealthy 15-nation west European bloc.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are making history ... Today our dream is becoming reality. Poland is returning to its European family," President Aleksander Kwasniewski told crowds in central Warsaw at a midnight flag-raising ceremony.
But a group of Polish Euro-sceptics heckled him. And in Prague, Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a longtime EU critic, gave a sour television address, saying Czechs would have to master Brussels' bureaucratic ways while preserving their identity.
More than 100,000 revellers thronged central Budapest, feting their return from the cold with fireworks, music and champagne, and Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy declared that "Hungary has returned to Europe ... It has deserved it, 10 million people have worked for it."
Crowds of tens of thousands rejoiced in Prague and Vilnius.
Leaders of the new 25-nation bloc, representing 450 million citizens, held a ceremonial summit in Dublin later yesterday to mark the birth of the world's biggest trading bloc, rivalling the US.
For East Europeans in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, enlargement crowns 15 years of often painful economic reforms since the collapse of communist rule.
In Brussels, headquarters of the EU, ambassadors of the 10 newcomers attended an emotional ceremony in the historic Grand' Place in which a spotlight picked out their flags one by one on the balcony of city hall as some 3,000 revellers cheered.
"We are all Europeans now," an announcer declared.
One of the fathers of European reunification, a tearful former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, told thousands at a ceremony in Zittau on the German-Czech-Polish border: "The message is there will never again be war in Europe."
Rejoicing was more muted in Cyprus after split referendums last Saturday meant the Greek Cypriot south of the island joins the EU despite rejecting a UN peace plan, while the Turkish Cypriot north remains outside it despite voting "yes."
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