IN EIGHT days the European Union will accept eight new members from Central and Eastern Europe, but with them it will inherit a problem.

From Estonia in the north to Slovenia in the south, the new states are finding it difficult to integrate restless ethnic communities. Now the EU is set to inherit the problems because, for many of the displaced or disenfranchised, emigration to the West is the only way out of their plight.

More than one million so-called “Euro-Russians” in the Baltic states are set to become the EU’s most restless minority, and could create a potential flashpoint with Moscow.

Russians make up 30 per cent of the population of Latvia and 28 per cent of Estonia. They can take on local citizenship if they pass strict language and national culture tests, but Estonian in particular is a very difficult language.

As a result, many of the Russians living in the Baltics are neither local citizens nor Russian citizens: they are stateless with no passport, no voting rights and the poorest of jobs. If populist politicians — such as Aivars Garda, a Latvian rightwinger who is determined to “decolonise” his country — try to marginalise them further, or even expel them, it is likely that Russia will come to their aid.

Out of Estonia’s 1.4 million inhabitants, 161,000 are stateless, and in Latvia the figure is as many as 500,000 out of a total population of 2.3 million.

Lithuania has a smaller Russian minority — barely 8.7 per cent of its population — and sees them as no threat to its national identity. It does, however, have 250,000 Poles who feel that their history and language have been undersold by the nationalist Government.

The birthplace of Marshal Josef Pilsudski, a Polish national hero, is a neglected wreck, inhabited by seven Lithuanian families on social welfare.

Slovenia, in most respects a modern, forward-looking society, has just voted to continue denying citizenship rights to 18,000 ethnic minority members. These people, all former citizens of the former Yugoslavia, were removed from the records after Slovenia declared independence in 1991. They are known as “the Erased” and enjoy only restricted residents’ rights as well as limited access to education, social welfare and hospitals. This year, 94 per cent of Slovenes voted against reinstating the Erased.

Across the region, harsh treatment of the Romas has become the norm; tensions are already flaring in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

So far only Hungary has made concerted attempts to deal with its minority problem. Under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon about 3.5 million Hungarians ended up living outside the Hungarian state. Hungary, as a condition of EU entry, sealed good neighbourhood agreements with all countries playing host to Hungarian minorities.

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