Returning to the vexed issue of migration and the possible consequences for current EU states of the arrival of 10 new members in May, the French news magazine Courrier International noted the collapse late last month of Ireland's former policy of placing no obstacles in the way of immigrants from the new Europe.
"In modelling its attitude on that of its large neighbour, Ireland has ended its 'European exceptionality'," wrote Courrier.
The Polish press was not sure all such restrictions on migration were legal. Or indeed ethical: all EU citizens, the daily Zycie observed mordantly, are of course equal, but some are more equal than others. Rzeczpospolita worried about the future of Polish "illegals" already working in the Union, about half a million people, it is estimated, the majority of them in Germany.
Gazeta Wyborcza pointed out the importance of emigrants' remittances to the Polish economy, and particularly to the survival of its poorest regions. "In the rural areas hardest hit by unemployment, the proportion of family income coming from abroad varies between 10 and 50 per cent. That means the survival of many people depends on the money sent home by their loved ones working in the Union."
The recent mass lootings of supermarkets by groups of Slovakian Roma protesting at social welfare cuts have focused attention in central Europe on the plight of this group of "poorest of the poor".
Four-fifths of Hungarian Roma, wrote sociologist Istvan Kemeny in the weekly Heti Vilaggazdasag, belong to that third of society which lives below the poverty line. And in contrast to the situation before the fall of communism, when most had a job, today only 28 per cent of Roma men are employed.
Yet in spite of this poverty there is little desire to emigrate, Roma activist Agnes Daroczi told Magyar Hirlap: "Who wants a new wave of migration? Certainly not the Roma. They want to live where they were born." About 1.4 million central European Roma will become citizens of the EU on May 1st; another 2.8 million could follow in 2007 if both Bulgaria and Romania join in that year, an incentive perhaps not to let too much more time pass before addressing their problems.
Bucharest's Adevarul, however, was doubtful if Romania would be ready to join the Union in 2007, chiefly because of its politicians' unwillingness or inability to tackle corruption or reform the justice system. "Our only hope is that there will be more European leaders who think Romania can change once inside the Union than demand that it do so before joining," the paper concluded forlornly.
In one of those typical "Gallic" newspaper stories which the Anglo-Saxons so relish and the French never tire of providing them, the Guardian's Jon Henley was much amused by an ill-tempered spat between two prominent literary heavyweights, Bernard Pivot, French TV's Mr Culture, and the austere and crotchety octogenarian Maurice Druon of the Académie française.
As the French language continued to lose ground internationally and as a working language of the UN and the EU, Henley wrote, Pivot and Druon had become locked in a kind of intellectual mud-wrestling over what words should or should not be acknowledged as "proper French".
Pivot the populariser, "an organiser of literary circuses ... a parader of dancing bears", according to Druon, under attack for too tolerant an attitude to slang and popular expressions, seemed well able to defend himself. The French language must be open to innovation, to new words and "daring inventions", he insisted. Otherwise, it would surely come to resemble Mr Druon, "immobile, muffled, mothballed and sclerotic".
Still on the linguistic front, Le Monde reported on some of the implications of the May 1st big bang: " ... as a large number of documents must be available in the 20 languages of the Union, the number of pages translated will go from 1.5 million in 2003 to 2.37 million in 2005 for the Commission alone."
The Union's personnel selection office is experiencing considerable difficulty in recruiting the necessary qualified staff. Forty people must be found equally competent in linguistic and legal studies for each of the new community languages. At the moment, this number cannot be found for Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese and Slovene.
Finally, Le Monde also reported on the project to launch a new British newspaper, The World, in tabloid format but with broadsheet or "quality" values. According to its initiator, Stephen Glover, one of the founders of the Independent, such a project has been made necessary by what he sees as the clear deterioration in quality of the British press, even at the top end of the market.
Among the faults he finds are "the search at all costs for a scoop, the confusion of information and commentary, the attempt to make stars of leading writers, the essential role of photo-reportage, the development of 'people' stories centred on sport and showbiz, and chequebook journalism, that is paying the public for information".
When Le Monde was founded in 1944, the paper remarked, its model was, to a considerable extent, the better kind of serious British newspaper. Its founder, Hubert Beuve-Méry, would scarcely have dreamed that the British would one day be paying him the compliment of borrowing his title.