Central Europe Marks EU Enlargement
May 01, 2004
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1 May 2004 -- Across Europe today, government officials and ordinary citizens observed the European Union's enlargement in individual ways.
Hundreds gathered in Germany's town of Zittau -- where the German, Polish, and Czech borders meet -- to celebrate their new unity.
Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla, Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder symbolically walked together to the point where their countries converge.
Then they visited the adjacent Polish town of Bogatynia and the Czech town of Hradek nad Nisou.
In Warsaw, anti-EU demonstrators protested against what they say is a diminishment of Polish sovereignty, threatening higher prices and taxes.
Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy and Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel joined each other in Hungary's border town of Sopron and together cut down an Iron Curtain-era barbed-wire fence.
(AP/AFP/Reuters/DPA)
(Click
here to see RFE/RL's "EU Expands Eastward" webpage.)