Transcript of part two of Misha Glenny's series of essays for The Westminster Hour

Recently I wandered back in time to when Europe was last united. I came across a place eager to accommodate Britons, Turks, Poles, Spaniards, Germans, Swedes, French, Bulgars, Russians and any other European people you may care to imagine or name. Muslims and Jews, too, were integral to the project and everyone mucked in as they built their common home.

Their goal was simple - to avoid death or, if that was impossible, then at the very least to allow death a swift and painless passage. The house built by this blue and white striped coalition was called Dachau, erected when my parents were children and dismantled only thirteen years before my own birth.

And when I visited Dachau last month, I saw for the first time with my own eyes, the words arching over the main entrance: Arbeit macht frei - work makes free¿the most untranslatable, most meaningless and most terrifying phrase that European culture has ever devised.

I sincerely believe that a visit to a former Concentration Camp should form part of the National Curriculum. For most continental Europeans, one or more of the camps is within easy reach and so less of a drain on school resources. But what a valuable investment for British children to wander around these monuments to Europe's record of violent cruelty, unparalleled and stupefying! One cannot be reminded too often why the European Union exists.

It is not just to make the rich countries of Western Europe even richer although one can sometimes be forgiven for thinking that this is what quite a lot of people in rich West European countries believe.

There is, indeed, in most parts of the EU an appreciable hostility to the prospect of ten new members joining this month and as far as I am able to ascertain on my travels, their greatest fear imagines our new European compatriots stealing our jobs and swallowing all our hard-earned tax pounds and Euros like some monstrous financial Charybdis whose thirst can never be quenched.

Let me pose a question which obviously given the nature of radio talks will be rhetorical. Of the 25 members of the European Union which one boasts the most progressive taxation system in the world (a flatrate 19% levy); a pension system that will guarantee a secure future; and (as of next year) will be able to claim the highest car production per capita not just in Europe but in the world?

Germany? What with their nightmarish tax system which is a chronic disincentive for any capital investment? Uh-uh. France? What with its unreformed state pension system that is just years from total, catastrophic collapse? I don't think so. Italy? What with the decay and decline of the Agnelli family's FIAT empire? Do me a favour!

Nope - the answer is .. Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh da ..Slovakia! Yes, you know the one - you're not quite sure where it is (faraway places of which we know bugger all and all that). Something about gypsies and didn't they have a sort of nasty Prime Minister.

Well, yes and what's more he almost became President a couple of weeks back (frankly the victor wasn't that much better). But all that is largely irrelevant because despite its reputation hovering between the invisible and the grubby, Slovakia has been quietly implementing all the incredibly strict rules demanded of it to join the EU. These reforms have involved damn hard work on the part of people who have suffered low living standards for a very long time.

I have always found Bratislava a rather gentle city, not especially beautiful but inoffensive. It seems only yesterday that water cannon deployed in the Slovak capital's main square fired a powerful jet that lifted me up off my feet, leaving me flat on my back as screaming women scattered in fear. That was in March 1989 - resistance to communism was not restricted to the Czech lands or Prague although few people reported on Slovakia's efforts to renounce the tedious crypto-stalinism of the post-war period.

After freedom came independence from the Czechs. But although on the surface, the break with the Czechs appeared just another manifestation of the nationalist fervour sweeping Eastern Europe and the Balkans, it was to my mind more a deftly-constructed Czech trick to jettison the slow-witted, doddering Slovak peasant state which Prague regarded as an economic and political millstone.

Who would have put money on the Slovaks having the last laugh. Let's look at the EU regional funding programme - every region in the EU's new member states is considered deserving of special development funds because they lie 75% or under the GDP average of the EU. Every region, that is, except one - the Slovak capital Bratislava which outstrips such elegant symbols of success like Prague, Krakow in Poland and Budapest.

Even Bratislava's neighbouring region in Austria, Burgenland, is in receipt of this assistance. Big investors with an eye on big profits are now regularly choosing Slovakia over Poland and the Czech Republic. Not bad for a country that less than a decade ago enjoyed pariah status throughout Europe because of its nutty, prejudiced Prime Minister.

But it is not just Slovakia that has seized on the European accession process to wash away the thick cobwebs of the socialist legacy. Fifteen years ago, Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, resembled one huge cemetery, the grandiose and monotonous slogans of the Soviet Communist Party acting as inscriptions on the headstones of graves where lay a moribund culture and a hibernating country.

Communicating with this eerie world beyond was a dark, grimy experience. As a neutral country, Sweden had more reason than most to keep open lines of communication with the Soviet Union and as a Baltic power, Sweden had more than a passing interest in Estonia. To facilitate good-neighbourly relations, Moscow allowed 8 telephone lines to operate between Sweden and the entire Soviet Union.

Swedes wanting to call Moscow, let alone Tallinn, often waited literally for days to get a connection, assured in the knowledge that once they did get through countless parties other than the two subscribers would be listening in on the call. Contrast that state of affairs, if you would, with the situation today in the Estonian capital from where a helicopter carrying business commuters between Tallinn and the Finnish capital, Helsinki, takes off every 20 minutes!

This rebirth of culture and creativity is comparable to the dramatic social change that swept away the grimly oppressive influence of the Catholic Church and allowed a modern and tolerant European state to flourish in Ireland. Portugal, Spain and now Greece have all experienced a similar development. But as the Irish, Spaniards and Greeks have already discovered, and the Balts and the Central Europeans are now slowly learning: this embrace into the bosom of Europe brings with it tribulations while latent fears, both irrational and rational, can also rise to the surface.

Some Czechs, for example, are convinced that EU membership will allow Germans to restake their claims to property in the Sudetenland from where they were brutally expelled in 1945. The belief persists that the Sudetenlaender intend to use Teutonic economic muscle to buy up property in their old territories and reassert German hegemony by stealth.

In many cities of Eastern Europe, there has been a much more tangible invasion - tourists and drinking parties in search of any manner of kicks in cheap metropolises. After Prague and Dublin, Tallinn has now become a favoured destination for the dreaded stag party outing, whose members believe their money buys them a right to crude, drunken behaviour. But while we should reserve sympathy for the innocent burghers of the Baltic states and central Eastern Europe, let us not forget that their businessmen and their economies are indeed keen to absorb the cash-flashing lager louts out on the pull.

The relationship between the new and old Europe is in fact a complex two-way process which brings short-term gains and losses on both sides. But if played correctly, it offers considerable long-term benefits for all of us. As Slovaks, Slovenes and Hungarians become richer, so will their desire to purchase goods and services from Western Europe. The Keynsian potential for growth in the European Union is now extraordinary.

There is one towering obstacle that looms - it is not to do with immigration although allow me a brief digression here: Immigration is problem but only, in my opinion, if West European countries continue to regard immigration as the devil's vanguard. Should xenophobia dictate the EU's economic policy allowing the development of an entirely non-productive pensioner class but preventing the renewal of its labour force through significant immigration, then in that event our living standards will fall dramatically compared to those in America and in the Far East - and with those living standards, we will lose many of our treasured ways of life that depend on continuing affluence.

No, immigration is not the issue - the chief problem with regard to the EU's new members is absorption. In the mind-numbing yet thankfully unwritten history of bureaucracy, the administrative embrace of Eastern Europe into the EU will assume the significance of the Roman Empire, the French and American Revolutions and the two World Wars all rolled into one. How will this vast construct actually work when we have never really understood how the Union of 15 members defined the relationship between Brussels and national governments. However much some people would like to see the EU as just a glorious customs union, it isn't and it hasn't been for a very long time. Successive governments have agreed to hand over elements of sovereignty to Brussels in order to increase economic efficiency.

The EU is an astonishing vehicle for growth and progress but one where, in my opinion, the economic capacity far outstrips the political capacity, leading to the inevitable observation that on the world stage we are economic giants but political dwarves. And the absorption of the new states will almost certainly compound this discrepancy as each country insists on its place at the Brussels trough.

I think that the controversial EU Constitution is not a device for imposing a European superstate on such plucky freedom fighters as Britain. Having worked trying to encourage a minimum degree of coherence in the EU's policies towards the Balkans over the past couple of years, I can assure all listeners that in my experience it is only national interests that prevail in the creation of foreign policy. This will not change. No, the constitution is an attempt, perhaps quixotic, to create a harmonic system so that the cacophony of those competing national interests, jealousies, prejudices and cunning within the EU can be scored into a recognizable orchestral work. While it is fanciful to imagine that the EU will ever function according to the harmonic genius of its Anthem, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, one might just occasionally be able to hear a recognizable tune or two among the tumult.

Whilst I love Europe and am a committed supporter of the European Union, I have real fears about its capacity to overcome this challenge. The procedural complexity of the Brussels bureaucracy means that the EU can never respond to major global events with any coherence. The fear is that the new members will turn a congested environment into a permanent state of bureaucratic gridlock. We shall see.

But enough of carping. The expansion of Europe creates the most affluent market in history whose largesse and ability to calm troubled waters is spreading slowly but to dramatic effect. Slowly but surely, our internal conflicts - above all Europe's former axis of death, hostility between France and Germany - slowly these are being soothed with the application of Europe's balm. Europe is building a new future. But while our continent dozes for years like a giant snake digesting its lunch of Central Europe, it must avoid torpor in preparation for to engage with its two greatest challenges - the Balkan powder keg and the enigma of Turkey - that will define our identity and our global role for at least the next fifty years.