`The last brick'.

Byline: The Register-Guard

A year ago, the voters of Ireland vetoed a plan to dramatically expand the European Union by admitting 10 nations, most of them in Eastern Europe. Last Sunday Ireland's voters had a welcome change of heart, and overwhelmingly approved the expansion. As one of Europe's greatest economic success stories, Ireland has now given the 10 countries the opportunity to become success stories of their own.

The countries seeking admission to the union in 2004 - provided a variety of technical and bureaucratic details can be worked out on time - are Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Estonia, Malta and Cyprus.

Two more countries, Bulgaria and Romania, are slated for EU admission in 2007 if they complete the required economic and political reforms. Turkey, a firm ally of the West and a member of NATO, is still waiting in the wings for the EU to even set a schedule for its application to enter the union.

Ireland's original rejection of the expansion, blamed mostly on a low voter turnout and a lackluster pro-expansion campaign by the Irish government, halted in mid-step the European continent's erasure of more than a half-century of East-West partition, first by Hitler's Germany and then by Stalin's Iron Curtain. Under EU rules, any one of the organization's 15 existing members could veto expansion. None, save Ireland, did that - and now even that veto has been lifted.

All 14 of the other EU members' approvals came by parliamentary vote. Only Ireland brought the question of EU expansion to the people, which meant that the earlier rejection was the result of the sole opportunity for an expression of popular opinion on the EU's future. It was significant that in the one nation where the people had a direct voice on EU expansion, they said no.

But now they've said yes. The president of the European Parliament - ironically, an Irishman named Pat Cox - said the 63 percent vote in favor of expansion had "given the clearest possible signal that Europe's rendezvous with destiny cannot be further delayed or postponed." Cox added, "The Irish, in their great wisdom, have symbolically taken the last brick from the Berlin Wall."

So it has, because now the European Union will stretch from Ireland through Western Europe and on through the Baltics to the Russian border. Free trade, open borders and the euro will prevail from Portugal to Estonia, and from Cyprus to Finland.

Though economic prosperity such as that enjoyed by Ireland and Spain in recent years, and in Western Europe before that, cannot be assured for the new members, EU membership does offer those countries the opportunity for success. And in the unsettled modern world, such opportunity is to be welcomed and encouraged.