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Oakley: Deal 'a great achievement'
BRUSSELS, Belgium -- CNN's European Political Editor Robin Oakley was in Brussels as EU leaders agreed a deal on enlargement, and assesses the significance of the decision. "What they have is an agreement among the 15 existing EU members on exactly the terms that they are going to offer to the 10 applicant countries who want to join the European Union. "Those countries are Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Cyprus. "The package that they will be offered gurantees that none of the countries, when they join the European Union, will be worse off financially than they are now. There will be a special compensatory mechanism for that. "There will be 23 billion euros ($23 billion) going to help them in structural aid. "But the only snag, perhaps, for some of them, is that they are only going to get farm subsidies at 25 percent of the rate that is given to the existing 15 EU members. "The applicant countries will be pretty happy. "Some of them were worried that if the process had been delayed, and there had been long wrangles, the growing Euro-scepticism in some of their countries, who have had to go through economic privations in order to qualify for the EU, might really have got worse. "They really were very, very anxious that some kind of deal came forward from this Brussels summit. "They have that now and there is no reason for delay, but there will be six weeks of pretty intense negotiations. "What the EU leaders wouldn't say here was whether there is any flexibility in the terms that they have set out, because some of those applicant countries will have trouble persuading their populace that they ought to accept the idea of entering the European Union -- and those referendums they are going to have to hold -- with those farm subsidies of only 25 percent. "A lot of them are agricultural countries, so I think they will press very hard for an increase in the starting level, at least, of farm aid. "However, there is no doubt about it, this has been a great achievement by the 15 countries agreeing the terms that they will now offer. "Negotiations will start on Monday in Copenhagen and they hope to wrap up the deal by the Copenhagen Summit in December."
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