World View: Last May Day the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia were welcomed into the European Union at a ceremony in the Phoenix Park, writes Paul Gillespie.
All told, their first year of membership has been a positive experience, fully reflected in opinion polls. It has also made a difference to the EU as a whole, both internally and externally. This will be reinforced depending on how France votes in its referendum on the constitutional treaty in four weeks' time.
Their combined gross domestic product has risen 5 per cent this and last year, compared to 3.7 per cent in 2003. Exports are up 20 per cent. EU transfers have hit home, especially CAP payments, raising farmers' incomes by up to 50 per cent.
Foreign direct investment has also increased in the region; in Poland it is expected to more than double to $10 billion this year compared to 2003. Those states benefiting most are anxious to see funding consolidated in the next EU budget for 2007-2013.
Negotiations have just begun, involving a tussle between beneficiaries and contributors, which the commission says will determine attitudes in central and eastern Europe for years to come.
Migration from the new members was restricted by treaty and national measures in most of the older EU states except Ireland, Britain and Sweden. But the strong flow of workers here is the most tangible manifestation of change; up to 50,000 people may have come over the last year, their remittances contributing to domestic savings in their home states. Fear of such migration remains a political problem in France and Germany, where unemployment remains high - about the same levels as in central and eastern Europe.
Such economic buoyancy was widely predicted ahead of enlargement. Continuing, it will generate medium- to long-term catch-up, economic regeneration and increasing stimulus to the EU economy as a whole - not unlike the effects of structural funds in Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal in a previous generation, the benefits of which flowed back in large part to Germany, France and other net contributors.
All the more reason for Ireland to support a generous approach to the budget negotiations, both for political good will and economic self-interest. We are still regarded as a model of development by the new member states, sharing in addition many historical features with them, including the experience of cultural nationalism and state-building.
So far they are not direct competitors; but that will come, and it is up to us to create a higher level of value, technology and productivity to maintain the momentum of growth here. Experiments with flat taxation in Estonia, Slovakia and elsewhere show this is a rapidly moving field.
Precisely such factors play into the French referendum campaign on the constitutional treaty. The treaty is substantially designed to create the political framework for a continental-scale EU of 450 million people.
But the long-term effects of this are feared by many French voters in socio-economic terms, because the constitution is assumed to encourage competitive social dumping instead of solidarity, and to inscribe a "neo-liberal yoke" facilitating the exploitation of French workers. Whether it is fair to blame this on enlargement or on the constitution is highly debatable, given that the right to regulate working conditions remains in each member state.
And if such transformations in Europe are in fact a subset of major global trends, the constitution is better seen as a constructive response to them, indeed a political protection against their unfettered impact. Such are the arguments in favour of the constitution by heavyweight figures on the French left such as Lionel Jospin, however belatedly they have become involved. It would be a mistake to underestimate their potential influence in swinging opinion by the 3-5 per cent required to win on May 29th.
The geopolitics of enlargement is also brought to the fore by the French campaign. It illustrates the great paradox that, while EU membership remains an immensely attractive goal and a deep stimulus for reform in actual and potential accession states, many people within the EU are dissatisfied with the state and direction of integration and ready to vote against the constitution in protest.
The French debate articulates this, even if, as Jospin complained in Thursday night's television interview, it reflects their discontent with high unemployment, unfair taxes, blocked wages and the rollback of the 35-hour working week, rather than with the constitutional treaty.
The political achievements of enlargement are often seen more clearly from outside. Speaking in Dublin this week, Harvard international relations theorist Joseph Nye itemised the EU's tremendous "soft power" which now challenges that of the US in global terms economically, normatively and in regulative terms - although not militarily. Enlargement has demonstrated its impressive dynamism.
The end of the Cold War and German reunification deeply affected the Franco-German relationship, he said, by making it unclear which is now the horse and which the rider.
Whereas François Mitterrand's response to the 1989 revolutions which launched those states on the road to EU membership was to deepen political union the better to contain German unity, this imperative seems to have faded among contemporary French leaders.
A French No would certainly lose them influence, not only with Germany, but in the wider Europe whose relations with Russia were dramatised this year in Ukraine's revolution. Central and eastern European leaders are troubled by Vladimir Putin's triumphalism about the forthcoming celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany and by his remark that its disintegration in 1991 was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.
An uneasy marriage?: Weekend 3