THE ARTS / After Communism: Karen Fricker reports from Estonia and Romania, countries with very different views of the European Union and of Ireland.

On St Patrick's night an orchestra of some 40 young Romanian musicians, most of them students at the National University of Music in Bucharest, took the stage of the Atheneul Roman, the city's premier concert hall, to play a programme of classical and contemporary Irish music, joined on stage in the second half by the great Irish uilleann piper Liam O'Flynn.

The event was broadcast live on Romanian television and attended by a host of dignitaries, including Gemma Hussey, the former minister for education, who was there to represent the Ireland Romania Cultural Foundation, a charitable organisation for which this was the launch event. Although Romania is not one of the 10 countries acceding to the European Union on Saturday - it and Bulgaria are working towards accession in 2007 - the concert was included in (and funded by) the cultural programme for Ireland's EU presidency, in a gesture of goodwill towards and support of the second team of our new European neighbours.

As an expression of cultural unity and of Ireland's leadership position within the EU at the time of accession, it couldn't have been more on message. But beyond such public, organised displays of cultural unity, how do Eastern European artists feel about integration?

A full seven of the 10 states acceding this week gained independence from the Soviet Union less than 15 years ago (and Slovenia from Yugoslavia around the same time). What is the reaction on the ground to joining another mega-union of states? And what, if any, impressions do young Eastern Europeans have of Ireland, put forward by officialdom as the model success story of a small nation within the EU?

They are huge questions, ones that could fill many volumes. The task I undertook for this article was to seek out some meaningful impressions by visiting two very different EU candidate nations: Romania, the lagging hopeful, and Estonia, referred to by one young artist in its capital, Tallinn, as the "good boy" of the 2004 accession states. The northernmost of the Baltic republics (which also include Latvia and Lithuania), Estonia embraced the new market economy of the 1990s and the run-up to its accession with vigour. It boasts a complex culture, as vibrant as it is tiny: there are only about 1.1 million Estonian speakers, 950,000 of whom live in the country itself.

Romania, on the other hand, is among the largest of the candidate countries, some 237,000 square kilometres in size - the Republic covers about 69,000 - with 21.7 million inhabitants. Euphemistically styled as a crossroads of Europe, its position in the far south-east of the continent has put it in the path of migrations, invasions and takeovers since prehistory; the country freed itself from one of the modern world's most horrific dictators, Nicolae Ceausescu, in 1989. But Ceausescu's legacy is everywhere: in Bucharest's bizarrely baroque architectural landscape, where beautiful, crumbling villas stand cheek by jowl with massive Soviet-style apartment blocks, and in the mentality of the people, for whom talking about the wrongs of Ceausescu's time still feels like a necessary purgation.

It is clear that corruption still plagues the Romanian government and society: every Romanian I met shared a deeply cynical view of the state as monolithic, old-fashioned and unconcerned with public welfare. Romania's currency, the leu, is among Europe's weakest: the country's GDP expressed in purchasing power is valued at only 27 per cent of the average of the EU's current 15 countries.

Young people working in the Romanian arts face a system with many features that date from communist times, not all of them negative, including highly selective training programmes for musicians. Entering the competitive career path of the professional musician is made particularly difficult for Romanians because of the exorbitant cost of travelling in and out of the country; there is a strong feeling of forced isolation. "There are so many good pianists out there, and they have agents and connections. I don't know anyone," says Ioana Mandrescu, the 22-year-old piano soloist at the Patrick's Day concert.

But while many young Romanians I met (and Estonians, for that matter) long to travel internationally, nearly across the board they exhibited a deep desire to settle back at home. The views of Mihnea Ignat, the 23-year-old conductor who organised the concert, are typical. "Sure, I'd like to work somewhere else - and then come back and spend the money in Romania. I would always come back here."

For most Romanians I spoke to, EU accession feels very far away and a bit vague. "I don't think it will change very much," says Ada Navrat, an actor. "I have a feeling like I can do something for myself in my society, but that society won't do anything for me."

Marcel Iures, artistic director of ACT Theatre, Bucharest's only independent producing and presenting venue, is clearer on the subject - and much more cynical. "Europe? It's not mainstream in my thinking. In the EU, culture is a false subject to increase the importance of a political project. I am not waiting for any European funds to increase my culture."

The most pessimistic view comes from the pianist Mandrescu. "In 30 years we will be one big happy Europe, but so much will be lost. People won't remember that this was once our country and our culture."

Knowledge of Irish culture was spotty among the Romanian artists I met: before the Patrick's Day concert the young musicians had heard of none of the composers they played.

Actors such as Navrat and her husband, Dani Popescu, who are currently performing Eugene O'Brien's Eden in Romanian at Bucharest's Nottara Theatre, seem to be fighting an uphill battle in their attempts to open the minds of Romanian theatre artists and audiences to the delights of stripped-down, monologue-driven contemporary Irish theatre. Exasperated after nearly a year of looking for a director who wasn't, in their words, "afraid of the text", they finally directed it themselves, only to have one of the reviews praise this "new Norwegian play".

Nearly everyone I encountered in Estonia, on the other hand, was knowledgeable and enthusiastic about Ireland - a result, surely, of that country's relatively close connection to Europe even during Soviet times, and also of a strongly felt affinity to another "little suppressed nation next to a big oppressing neighbour", as Andre Help, an editor at the Estonian Institute, puts it.

Irish literature and folk music played important roles in the country's mid-1980s cultural awakening, says Jaak Johanson, a folk singer, who recalls clandestine culture-building evenings at which Wilde's poetry, and Beckett and Friel's plays, were read. The Estonian passion for Irish drama continues in a current vogue for Martin McDonagh's plays, which Anne-Ly Sova of the Estonian Drama Agency attributes to McDonagh's depiction of rural life, with which Estonians identify. "We don't have our own plays about these themes, so we have to take them from somewhere else."

Krista Kaer, a translator and publisher, comes at it from a more critical direction. "Estonians have an idealised view of Ireland. McDonagh meets those expectations."

What is understood as modern Estonia was actually the product of a period of intense nation-building in the mid-19th century, as teachers and priests came together to unite and motivate ethnically Estonian serfs against the combined oppression of Baltic German nobles and Tsarist rule. Given the relative youth of this culture - the national epic was written in the 1860s - what constitutes "authentic" in an Estonian context is a rather hot conversational topic.

The two-yearly Estonian Song Contest, at which a third of the population comes together for an orgy of outdoor folk singing, is either, depending on whom you talk to, the purest expression of the country's culture or a fake tradition that puts imported German singing styles above ancient native ones.

What most Estonians can agree on is the centrality of their language to national identity. "Our language is our resistance," says Harry Liivrand, an art critic. "It's so bloody unique. And thanks for that: Estonia as a nation survived because of that." A Finno-Ugric language resembling, among European tongues, only Hungarian and Finnish, Estonian has 14 cases and no articles or grammatical gender. It is notoriously difficult to learn.

There was a high awareness of the issues surrounding EU accession among most of the young artists I spoke to - and a fair amount of fear and scepticism. "People have doubts," says Tatjana Kozlova, a fourth-year composition student at the Estonian Music Academy. "Economically, we don't know how it will develop. We've been free from the USSR for just a few years, and now to go into a big union again . . ."

By and large, though, many accept EU accession as politically and economically inevitable; they are more concerned about the cultural ramifications. "I think it's better for there to be a bigger and more powerful Europe," says the composer Peeter Vaahi, "but I don't think that Estonian music will be more interesting if we become a member of the EU. Culturally, it would be better to be independent."

But translator Kaer, for her part, is sanguine. "Up to now the EU has supported cultural diversity and the culture of small nations - a good example is Ireland. I don't think that the situation with the Irish language or culture has gotten worse with EU inclusion. Joining the EU can give more opportunities to develop smaller countries."

The night before I left Estonia I ended up in the midst of some active culture-building when a friend took me to an evening of folk dancing in a central-Tallinn music hall: 30 or so young Estonians dancing to traditional music and, when the band took a break, to their own a cappella singing.

Were it not for the contemporary clothes and the onlookers texting madly on the ubiquitous Estonian mobile phone, this céilí felt as if it could have taken place centuries ago. But Jaak Johanson later revealed that he started up these dance evenings a few years ago in an attempt to fuel interest in traditional culture among young Tallinners and that most of the people who come along probably wouldn't have known the dances at first. I met Johanson in the KuKu Club, a basement venue where he had just hosted Tallinn's first poetry slam, part of what he described as an effort to re-enliven the spoken word as a site of resistance to cultural commodification. "It's all about festivals these days," he sighed. "It's hard to keep things alive."

On the way to Tallinn airport my taxi driver revealed himself as a recently returned expatriate who had lived and worked in Russia, France and Finland for more than 20 years. An Estonian nationalist, returning to the bosom of the mother country? Hardly. "It's too expensive everywhere else in Europe now. I came back because I can afford it here."

So you're back just in time for prices to go up now the EU is here, I countered before I could stop myself. He shot me a dirty look in the rear-view mirror. I paid him in euro and gave him a big tip, as if that would help.

You can get more information about the cultural programme for Ireland's presidency of the EU at www.eu2004.ie