[EU top officials listening to final speech
          by Swedish premeir, Goran Persson at
          EU summit in Gothenburg, Saturday, 16, Jun
          2001. Read photo caption below.]
          
EU commits to enlargement with offer of late 2002 target date

GOTHENBURG, Sweden, June 17 (AFP) -
The European Union has strengthened its commitment to an historic expansion into eastern Europe and the Mediterranean by setting a long-awaited target date of late 2002 to wrap up accession talks with front-running candidate countries.

Capping a two-day summit that ended here Saturday, the heads of state and government of the 15-nation bloc took the added step toward an enlargement that will nearly double its size over the next decade.

"The enlargement process is irreversible," declared a final summit statement, which also made clear to the 12 candidate nations awaiting admission that the date was a target, not a deadline.

"Candidate countries will continue to be judged solely on their own merits", it said, adhering to compromise wording hammered out by the Swedish EU presidency to satisfy the qualms of France and Germany, which had viewed a target date as "unrealistic".

The phraseology, said an EU source, put responsibility for the success of negotiations squarely on the candidate countries' shoulders.

"I think enlargement was the most important part of this summit," said Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson, whose country hands over the EU presidency to Belgium on July 1.

Persson had lobbied his fellow EU leaders hard for a strong signal to the 12 applicants that Europe's club of rich nations does want to have them in.

"Provided that progress towards meeting the accession criteria continues at an unabated pace, the road map (to enlargement) should make it possible to complete negotiations by the end of 2002 for those candidate countries that are ready," the summit concluded.

In addition to the target date, the summit also agreed that successful candidates "should participate in the European Parliament elections of 2004 as members".

Reactions from the candidates varied.

Viktor Orban, youthful prime minister of Hungary, which shares the front-runner spot with Cyprus, was delighted with the prospect his country would probably be a full-fledged EU member in three years.

"It is now very possible that our children will be able to enter into adulthood as European Union citizens, and it will be thanks to the events of this week," he said. "I guess you can see the delight on our faces."

Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek of Poland, whose once front-runner country is falling back, said the setting of a target date might help to perk up flagging public enthusiasm back home.

The 12 candidates are rated in progress by how many so-called negotiating "chapters" they have satisfied and closed.

Each chapter represents a portfolio of economic, political, social or environmental EU standards which the candidate country must meet by enacting appropriate legislation or reform.

The candidate countries are for the most part poorer and less developed than the 15 current members, and the long negotiating process is designed to prevent them from coming into the EU as burdens.

Getting EU enlargement solidly back on track was the two-day summit's top priority, after foot-dragging these last months by the EU's agrarian southern members, fearful of losing part of their precious EU farm subsidies to the newcomers.

There have also been concerns by the richer EU members that enlargement would bring a wave of unwanted immigration from the east.

Enlargement suffered a surprise blow last week when a referendum in Ireland rejected the Nice Treaty -- a set of EU institutional decision-making reforms agreed last December that must be put in place before expansion can go ahead.

Hungary, Cyprus, Slovenia and Estonia are the most advanced candidate countries, although many doubt that enlargement would proceed without Poland, the biggest of all the hopefuls, and the Czech Republic which, with Hungary, joined NATO in 1999.

Other nations in various stages of accession talks with the European Commission in Brussels are Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Mediterranean island of Malta.

Turkey is also a recognized EU candidate, but cannot start accession talks until it meets EU norms on democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
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PHOTO CAPTION

European Commission President Romano Prodi (L) and EU Security Chief Javier Solana (R) listen to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson's final address on the last day of the EU Summit in Gothenburg June 16, 2001. The EU leaders pledged to step up the pace of eastward enlargement and vowed joint action to prevent any repetition of anarchist riots that scarred their Swedish summit. (Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters)
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