The Great Enlargement of the European Union: 1 May 2004
2004 · event
At midnight on 1 May 2004 ten countries joined the European Union at the same moment. Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia brought about seventy five million people into the Union in the largest single enlargement in its history. Celebrations were held on the old border crossings, where barriers were lifted and people walked across the lines that had divided the continent for two generations.
Most of the new members had been on the other side of the Iron Curtain fifteen years earlier. Preparation had taken a decade of negotiation and the adoption of tens of thousands of pages of common rules covering everything from food safety to competition law, a process that reshaped courts, ministries and markets long before the day itself. The accession treaty had been signed in Athens in April 2003.
For Slovenia the date completed a path that had begun with independence in 1991. The country adopted the euro in 2007, joined the Schengen area the same year, and held the presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2008, the first of the new members to do so.
The enlargement is judged differently depending on where the question is asked. It brought freedom of movement, funds for infrastructure and a legal framework that anchored young democracies, and it also brought emigration of the young and skilled from some regions and disputes about wages and services in others. What is not disputed is the size of what happened. On a single night, a division that had been treated as permanent stopped existing on the map.