EU Accession

JAN 01 2004 · 12:00

The Athens ceremony, 16 April 2003. The accession treaty of the ten new member states is signed; the Czech Republic joins the European Union on 1 May 2004. Place: Dublin Castle · Old Town Square, Prague Figures: Vladimír Špidla, prime minister · Cyril Svoboda, foreign minister · Václav Klaus, president (absent in protest) · Bertie Ahern, Irish taoiseach and Council president On May 1, 2004, the European Union admits ten member states in a single act. Eight come from the former Soviet sphere: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia. Cyprus and Malta join from the Mediterranean. The treaty of accession had been signed in Athens a year earlier. The Czech referendum in June 2003 approved entry by seventy-seven percent on a fifty-five percent turnout. The central ceremony is held at Dublin Castle. Prime Minister Špidla and Foreign Minister Svoboda represent the Czech Republic. Václav Klaus, the Czech president and a longtime Euro-skeptic, declines to attend. He sends a written statement instead, expressing the position that the Czech Republic enters the Union as a sovereign state, not as a region of someone else's project.