Two worlds meet in the expanded EU

Sundered for decades by war and ideology, Europe will make itself whole again Saturday, as the European Union takes in 10 new members, most of them former Soviet satellites.

The historic expansion gathers 450 million people under Europe's 12-starred blue flag and sweeps aside the last vestiges of the cold war. It also forms a union of startling disparities: The new members are twice as poor as the old.

When the new entrants look West, they see a future they hope will be brightened by economic prosperity. But when the current members look East, 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they see the spread of democratic values they hope will underpin continental peace.

The EU boasts that it is the world's largest trading bloc. But its most important exports, some argue, are intangible.

"It's much more than a question of commercial values," says John Palmer, political director of the European Policy Centre, a Brussels think tank. "Europeanization is fundamentally about political and human values, and the changes they have wrought are as profound as the economic changes" in new member states.

Along with a functioning market economy, applicants for EU membership must be able to boast a pluralist democratic political system and full respect for human rights, before they can start negotiations.

The results are felt, even if they are taken for granted, on the streets of Budapest, says Andras Balogh, a foreign policy adviser to Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy. "The public has forgotten the question of values," Mr. Balogh says. "The pluralistic system is so taken for granted now, and European values are shared in Hungary."

The EU's human rights standards have sparked reform in other countries hoping to join. Further afield, as Europe seeks to influence and modernize a Muslim country bordering Iraq, Turkey is quietly and slowly reforming itself in the hope of one day meeting EU conditions.

Turkey may be cleaning up its human rights record "for reasons of prosperity and economic progress, but they are still making reforms and genuine changes," says Maggie Nicholson, an official with the Council of Europe who has worked with judges in Turkey to reform the judiciary there.

Over the past two years the Turkish Parliament has passed wide-ranging reforms - banning the death penalty, allowing Kurds to broadcast in their own language, and toughening measures against torture. Though they have not all been implemented, "they have been driven through largely on the prospect of membership in the European Union," says Mr. Palmer.

"That is the motor force for progress ... and potentially the same could happen elsewhere."

The prospect of more aid and trade could tempt even the most vilified of international pariahs to rethink his policies, EU officials hope: Libya's Col. Muammar Qaddafi was in Brussels this week discussing his country's prospects of joining an association with the EU. The price would be a radical overhaul of Libya's one-party state and an end to human rights abuses.

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