A brief story may help to illustrate. I conducted one interview with a Bulgarian immigrant who had been working in the Czech Republic before coming to Spain. Apart from the rather hilarious detail that he twice tried to cross the border with Austria at night on a bicycle, only to be turned back by the Austrian police, he finally acquired forged documents suggesting he was in fact Czech. He and two other similarly documented Bulgarians then went to Poland. In Poland they took a bus, which was otherwise full of Poles, bound for Paris. At the frontier with Germany, all the Poles were made to get off the bus by the German police, and the three Bulgarians were allowed to make their way to Paris on an otherwise empty bus.

Somewhere here you have the nub of the problem.

>There has been nothing speedy about the process
>of enlargement. Nothing hasty. And “as soon as
>possible” only in a very peculiar Brussels
>definition of the phrase, as anyone writing for
>the Financial Times certainly ought to know.

I wonder if anyone ever attempted to speed-read the acquis? I guess it just takes 14 years…

But kidding aside, there is the readyness problem for economic and social integration as well as the tricky question of reallocating ressources from regions where they could still do some good. Above all, there are far more people involved now then ever, so it takes a while to let them speak. In general, abstracting from some early French strategic problems, I would say that “as soon as possible” is rather accurate…