The Mayor of Szczecin, a Solidarity veteran called Marian Jurczyk, had to choke back his revolutionary instincts the other day and urge his fellow Poles not to smash up a Western supermarket. The shop’s shelves were full of cheap, heavily subsidised European Union food — a boon for consumers but commercial death for unsubsidised Polish farmers who cannot hope to compete with CAP-enriched cheese, milk and lamb chops.

It was one sign of the anger that is growing across the region. The EU is making a comic theatre out of its decision to take on ten new members this week, but the truth is that it has spent the past two years bullying and bludgeoning Central Europe. Tens of thousands of pages of detailed entry requirements have been foisted on the East.

Now, on the eve of the Copenhagen summit which seals the deal, the strain is starting to show. The over-regulated EU, run by a swollen bureaucracy, has done its level best to neutralise the East as future competitors and stifle the very energy that makes the region historically important and economically significant.

For sure, we should celebrate the growing together of East and West. But this long-winded negotiation, staggering this week into its final days, was conducted like a hostile takeover bid. Next year Central Europeans will hold referendums to approve the Copenhagen offer; not surprisingly it looks likely to be a close-run vote in several countries. The EU has behaved disgracefully: the historic fusion of the continent has become a petty exercise, a veritable flea circus.

Competition is being quietly, systematically squashed. Eastern regions with special investment incentives will have to be phased out — the Czech Republic cannot, after all, be allowed to lure investment away from eastern Germany. Just to make certain that Polish milk can never compete with imported German milk, the European Commission has declared that only 38 dairies meet EU standards. “We like our milk this way,” a Polish official recently told a visitor from Planet Brussels. For the commission, this is a very weak argument indeed.

Some money will flow eastwards, of course — though significantly less than has been invested in east Germany since unification — and some of the painful economic restructuring would have been necessary even without EU entry. But membership of this odd club means that lucrative markets will wither. The new eastern border of the EU — above all, with Ukraine and Belarus — has to be closed hermetically.

The idea of “Europe” was always a counterpart to totalitarian rule. After the implosion of communist rule, joining the Union seemed a natural progression. After Versailles the newly founded states of the region looked to France as a protector; in the 1930s German tutelage took over. From 1944, the Soviet Union became the dominant regional power. Now the Union is assumed to be the new shield of the Central Europeans. The growing awareness of the gap between Europe as an idea and Europe as a set of detailed foreignimposed rules is what is stirring the current dismay. The fact is that “Europeanism” has become a kind of ideology and Central Europeans are rightly suspicious of it.

“Why?” asks the Czech conservative Vaclav Klaus (who will run for the presidency next month), “should the Czechs replace Moscow with Brussels?” The brand of Europe projected by Brussels, says Mr Klaus, seeks to “minimise the role of the one indisputably genuine and developed level of human organisation known as the nation state”. It seems to me that the best thing that could happen to the region next year is if Mr Klaus wins (against heavy odds) the Czech presidency.

Perhaps it should not be surprising that the Estonians (ahead even of Czechs and Poles) have become the most sceptical about EU membership. The small Baltic state has an open, modern economy which embarrasses Germany and the other Western dinosaurs. Typically, Estonians use mobile phones to pay parking fees and bus tickets — a text message to the local council suffices. School children are taught on personal computers from the age of eight. Educational programmes are broadcast at prime time, the tax rate for individuals and companies is set at a standardised 26 per cent while reinvested profits are not taxed at all. The country has drawn level with the United States in listings of the world’s most liberal economies.

All the new members have similar stories. Slovenia, for example, is the only country in Europe which is managing to increase the number of its theatres, ballet companies and operas. Poland and Hungary are bursting with young entrepreneurs.

How do we harness this energy? How can we benefit from it? Here is a start: we stop telling our neighbours how to bottle their milk and harmonise their sewage systems.

Little wonder that the relationship between the US and Eastern Europe is growing so quickly: Washington, even on the cusp of a Middle East war, is offering encouragement and a firmly defined strategic role for these neglected countries. Brussels, by contrast, is offering at best a second-class status to the East. Direct grants to eastern farmers are pegged at 25 per cent of the sum handed out in the West, edging up year by year until 2013. Eastern workers will be kept out of the EU until at least 2009.

The rhetoric from Western Europe is still couched in the idiom of Jörg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen — the threat from the East, the swarming car thieves, the illegal labourers stealing our jobs. Western electorates sense that, as with the euro, they have been hoodwinked into another costly project. There is little passion, little conviction in the need for eastward expansion. The Central Europeans would be right to ask themselves in Copenhagen this week: is this as good as it gets?

The author is Berlin correspondent of The Times.

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