European Union (EU) leaders, meeting in Copenhagen, are poised to sign an agreement to admit ten new members to their hitherto exclusive club. Eight of the fortunate acceders are former communist countries: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania are tentatively slated to join in 2007. The exercise will cost in excess of $40 billion over the next three years. The EU's population will grow by 75 million souls. In the wake of the implosion of the USSR in 1989-91, the newly independent countries of the Baltic and central Europe, traumatized by decades of brutal Soviet imperialism, sought to fend off future Russian encroachment. Entering NATO and the EU was perceived by them as the equivalent of obtaining geopolitical insurance policies against a repeat performance of their tortured histories. This existential emphasis shifted gradually to economic aspects as an enfeebled, pro-Western and contained Russia ceased to represent a threat. But the ambivalence towards the West is still there. Mild strands of paranoid xenophobia permeate public discourse in central Europe and, even more so, in east Europe. The Czechs bitterly remember how, in 1938, they were sacrificed to the Nazis by a complacent and contemptuous West. The Poles and Slovenes fear massive land purchases by well heeled foreigners (read: Germans). Everyone decries the "new Moscow" - the faceless, central planning, remote controlling bureaucracy in Brussels. It is tough to give up hard gained sovereignty and to immerse oneself in what suspiciously resembles a loose superstate. But surely comparing the EU or NATO to the erstwhile "Evil Empire" (i.e., the Soviet Union) is stretching it too far? The USSR, after all, did not hesitate to exercise overwhelming military might against ostensible allies such as Hungary (1956) and the Czechoslovaks (1968)? Try telling this to the Serbs who were demonized by west European media and then bombarded to smithereens by NATO aircraft in 1999. Though keen on rejoining the mainstream of European history, civilization and economy, the peoples of the acceding swathe are highly suspicious of Western motives and wary of becoming second-class citizens in an enlarged entity. They know next to nothing about how the EU functions. They are chary of another period of "shock therapy" and of creeping cultural imperialism. Rendered cynical by decades of repression, they resent what they regard as discriminatory accession deals imposed on them in a "take it or leave it" fashion by the EU.