The introductory paragraph of the conclusions adopted at the European Council at Luxembourg makes large and for the most part valid claims about the historic significance of the decisions it took for the future of the European Union and for Europe as a whole. Enlargement negotiations to take in 10 states from central and eastern Europe, plus Cyprus, and the decision in principle that Turkey is eligible for membership, are indeed the "dawn of a new era finally putting an end to the divisions of the past" after the end of the Cold War. It is very much to be hoped that the extension of the European integration model to encompass the whole of the continent is indeed, as the document puts it, "a pledge of future stability and prosperity" - and not the substitution of new divisions for the old ones that the Luxembourg Council has decisively rejected.
Negotiations are to open with Poland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and Cyprus in the immediate future, on the basis that they are best qualified and prepared for the rigours of full membership. Latvia, Lithuania, the Republic of Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania are less so, but are to be included in comprehensive pre-accession partnerships and annual screening arrangements designed to accelerate their progress towards membership. Turkey is in a third category, with special conditions on offer, which unfortunately its government rejected last night.
The process of enlargement will certainly last a generation or two before it is complete in this continental geographic sense. It will necessitate a radical restructuring of decision-making rules, citizen identification and representation of member-states - each of them with the clear potential for dispute and the possible marginalisation of smaller states. These dangers have been relatively well flagged. There now arises from the Luxembourg Council a new set of challenges concerning differentiation and divisions. How compatible will economic and monetary union among the most developed western European states be with a continental enlargement to take so many less developed ones? Does the fiscally parsimonious model of integration signalled by this summit genuinely have the capacity to carry the political and economic weight assigned to it? Will the objective differentiations between the two groups of states accepted at Luxembourg be reinforced by EMU or mitigated by the imaginative pre-accession arrangements now put in place?
These large questions should prove sufficiently challenging to engage the commitment and interest of the next generation, which will have responsibility for completing this ambitious European edifice. It now becomes essential that we in Ireland get to know these applicant states and peoples better. Many of them have recently set up diplomatic and commercial representations here. We have been much too slow to reciprocate. As the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, pointed out in Luxembourg, Ireland's successful development in recent years with the help of EU transfers and policies has made it a model and exemplar for the applicant states. We have much to gain from new trade and investment relations with them and much to learn from the political and cultural diversity they will bring to the European Union.