ECONOMICS European Union adds 10 countries, becoming a financial powerhouse

Some residents of the new EU countries worry about losing national identity.
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- The European Union expanded at midnight Friday to take in 10 nations isolated during the Cold War, creating an economic giant with the potential to rival the United States.
Church bells rang and fireworks exploded over eastern Europe as hundreds of thousands jammed city squares in celebration.
The historic enlargement increased the EU to 25 countries by encompassing a broad swath of the former Soviet bloc -- a region separated for decades from the West by barbed wire and ideology -- and widening to 450 million citizens.
EU leaders hailed the entry of the newcomer nations as "the end of the artificial divisions of the last century."
The EU's biggest expansion in its 47-year history brings in eight formerly communist countries -- the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia -- along with Cyprus and Malta.
Heads of state were gathering in Ireland, which holds the rotating EU presidency, for a formal "Day of Welcomes" in Dublin today.
"For me, it's a great day," said Lenka Sladka, 24, a Prague university student. "Now we can freely travel or study everywhere. My parents could not even dream of it."
"It's a day that we will read about in history books," said Eliza Malek, a 17-year-old celebrant in Warsaw, Poland.
What this means
The move bolsters the EU's already powerful financial punch, putting its yearly economic output on a par with that of the United States.
At the same time, its market of 450 million people is larger than the 420 million served by NAFTA, the free trade agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Enlargement stirred strong emotions both in the "new" Europe -- so dubbed by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, which most of the newcomers supported -- and in the "old."
The EU flag -- a circle of yellow stars on a blue field -- went up Friday outside the presidential palace in tiny Slovakia, where parliament speaker Pavol Hrusovsky delivered a stirring reminder of how far the country has come since shaking off communism.
"In 1989, we cut up the barbed wire. Pieces of this wire have for us become a symbol of the end of the totalitarian regime," he said.
"For the generation which lived in captivity of the barbed wire, the EU means a fulfillment of a dream."
French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said he gets misty just thinking about it.
"I get tears in my eyes," he said while meeting with students from the 10 new countries. "I am part of a generation that believes in Europe. Europe is the force that prevents hate from being eternal. We must open our hearts to this new Europe."
Some concerns
But the jubilation was tinged with frustration: fears in the newcomer nations of a loss of national identity and steep price increases, and worries in the EU's core 15 member states of a crush of immigrants as national borders gradually disappear.
Bomb threats forced the closure of a key border crossing between the Czech Republic and Germany for more than four hours Friday.
Leftist protesters marched in Berlin for "communism instead of Europe," and a group of avowed Czech "Euro-skeptics" planned a mock funeral today to "bury" the country's sovereignty.
"Joining the EU is a necessary evil," said Zsolt Meszaros, 35, a Budapest doctor. "There are just too many uncertainties in all of this to make me more enthusiastic."
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder sought to allay concerns among Germans that lower-paid workers from Poland and other eastern countries would threaten their jobs.
Greater trade across the enlarged Europe "will make us not poorer, but richer," he said in a nationally broadcast speech.
Musicians clad in EU national costumes played traditional songs on Prague's central Wenceslas Square, where the mass demonstrations of former President Vaclav Havel's Velvet Revolution ended communism in the Soviet-dominated country he famously dubbed "Absurdistan."
Enlargement was born of "centuries nourished by intolerance, conquests and war," European Commission President Romano Prodi told a ceremony at a town on the Slovene-Italian border.