Posted Sunday, Oct.13, 2002; 16.04 BST

Among the biggest losers will be farmers, who have become enlargement's most vocal opponents. They know that products from existing members, heavily subsidized by the Common Agricultural Policy, will swamp them once trade barriers disappear — and that their own subsidies from Brussels will be limited at first to one-quarter of Western levels. Romania, due to join in 2007, shows the problems most starkly. It has 5.1 million farms of less than three hectares, compared to an average farm size of 18 hectares in existing E.U. countries; agriculture is responsible for 11% of its GDP, compared to 2% in the E.U. The dean of Ljubljana University, former Foreign Minister Joze Mencinger, has a mordant suggestion for protecting farming in the east. "We should really register it as a form of cultural activity," he says, like folk dancing. "It has more to do with our way of life than with profit."

There will, of course, be winners too. Big business will certainly gain, including some homegrown entrepreneurs in the east who have brought their firms up to Western standards but pay lower wages. "The E.U. is a chance for Polish products," says Klaudiusz Balcerzak, co-owner of several plants that now produce 17,000 tons of traditional meats a year. He already has fancy delicatessens in Berlin and Rome and the quality permits needed to export more of his products. "I would be very happy if we joined tomorrow — duties of 40% would vanish and I would become highly competitive both in quality and price."

Construction companies and local laborers will benefit too, from subsidies to build roads, waste-treatment plants and other infrastructure. The young and educated will gain opportunities for study and work abroad. That optimistic thought contributes to what Estonian pollster Ainar Voog calls the "Grandma Factor" — older people, who might end up losing out from enlargement themselves, "support entry because they see it will be good for their children and grandchildren."

The 80,000 pages of laws and regulations attached to the E.U.'s admission ticket are sweeping away a lot of fond familiar ways. In August, for example, Czechs had to give up their tradition of choosing unwrapped donuts and other pastries with their hands, because of E.U. health regulations. There were pungent protests. Individually these sorts of changes don't amount to much, but collectively they make people nervous that their national cultures will disappear. Václav Klaus, a former Czech Prime Minister and a vocal euroskeptic, says, "We mustn't allow ourselves to dissolve in Europe like a sugar cube in a cup of tea."

	"Nowhere does the word Europe vibrate with more emotion than in the countries of the east." — ION ILIESCU, President of Romania

Another unhappy realization beginning to dawn on the applicants is that the fraternity they're joining is going to haze them. Full agricultural subsidies won't be available for at least seven years — otherwise France and Germany would have vetoed enlargement to protect their farmers and budgets. Free movement of new members' citizens to work and live throughout the E.U. will be restricted for at least five years, to make sure politicians in the core countries don't face voter ire about unrestrained immigration. Ludek Zahradnícek, a Czech official in charge of selling enlargement, realizes his compatriots "take this as discrimination and it could be understood this way." His counterargument: "At least 25% subsidies are better than zero subsidies." But second-class status still rankles.

And then there's a problem that frustrates the E.U.'s founders too: the remoteness and impenetrability of its institutions. Few E.U. detractors go so far as Uno Silberg, an Estonian who keeps a fanciful list of 22 reasons why the E.U. is like the Soviet Union (No. 5, Interpol is like the KGB; No. 11, the European Commission is similar to the Politburo). But many in the east suspect the Brussels game will be permanently rigged against the novices — whose combined GDP, after all, is about the same as the Netherlands'. Klaus says that the conditions of entry offered his country "were a totally unilateral dictate and that the chances of a small accession country influencing the process are negligible." He thinks staying out is impossible, but that Eastern and Central Europeans will find their homecoming a rude awakening: "I don't believe the fairy tales about a community of loving European states. It's a power struggle, where each country tries to maximize its gains."

In the European Convention now meeting under the leadership of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, delegates from around Europe, including the candidate countries, are exploring how to overhaul the E.U. to make it closer to voters and more effective. Its result, believes Liberal M.E.P. Andrew Duff, will be "a transfer of sovereignty" to the E.U.'s central institutions — which unless handled deftly could give nations with painful memories of Soviet-style diktats another reason to question where the E.U. bus is taking them.

That bus must first navigate the Irish speed bump. The danger is that with a no vote on Nice, enlargement will lose its sense of inevitability, and the whole enterprise will founder in a sea of squabbles. "It could be contagious," says Hübner, the Polish Minister for European Affairs, "and that would leave us with a case of hiccups for the rest of history."

Whatever the hiccups, history is still on the side of enlargement. It's true that the Union is showing more warts than in the early days after the Soviet collapse when the E.U. embodied what Prague-based analyst Jonathan Stein calls a "civilizational standard" for the newly democratic nations of the east, "a way of completing both symbolically and materially the move to the West." Now the aspirant countries are more skeptical. Their politicians still want in, but are trying to get better terms. This is not ingratitude, or irrationality, but maturity. Ardor has gone; a thoroughly modern — and Western — mix of self-interest, conflicting opinions and, yes, apathy has replaced it. Maybe that's a sign that this historic union will work after all: the newcomers will fit right into the club.

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