The European Union was on the road to becoming wider and bigger today after embracing 10 mostly ex-communist nations but now has to make an orderly home for 450 million people speaking a multitude of languages.
With all-night champagne parties celebrating the EU`s biggest ever expansion over, reality was still setting in about what comes next and what could still go wrong.
The decision to add 10 new members to the present 15 came at the end of an intense two-day Copenhagen summit and means the EU's population will grow by 20 percent to 450 million people, creating an economic colossus to rival the United States.
On the horizon are another 65 million if Turkey fulfils its pledge to be ready to start formal entry talks by 2004.
"Good Morning Europe," was the headline of Poland's leading business daily Rzeczpospolita while Slovenia's Novy Cas proclaimed "We`ve got it. They invited us to the EU."
"Europe is spreading its wings in freedom, in prosperity and in peace. This is a truly proud moment for the European Union," Danish Prime Minister Mr Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the summit host, said in an emotional final speech.
Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Malta won the right to join the EU in May 2004, creating a bloc of 25 nations extending from the Atlantic to the eastern Mediterranean.
The candidates, whose 75 million citizens are, on average, less than half as well off as their EU counterparts, won promises of extra cash, higher farm subsidies and output quotas in bargaining which ran late into Friday evening.
EU leaders made minor concessions, but managed to keep the overall cost of paying for the expansion to some €40.8 billion - less than was originally budgeted back in 1999.
But the challenges before formal entry are many.