Hungary: Western Europe is being accused of 'enlargement malaise', writes Daniel McLaughlin in Budapest.
As French critics of the EU constitution decry an influx of cheap labour from the east, the central European nations accused of stealing Gallic jobs fear they will be the ones to suffer most if France rejects the embattled treaty in Sunday's referendum.
The humble Polish plumber has played an unusually prominent role in the French scrap over the constitution, being cast as the embodiment of "social dumping" - the arrival in the West of cheap workers from the new EU member states and the outsourcing of jobs from France and elsewhere to lower- cost offices and factories in Central Europe.
In the eight former Eastern Bloc countries which joined the EU last May, where an average monthly wage is less than €500, France's vote on the constitution is being seen as a broad referendum on the wisdom of past and future EU expansion.
"If the French reject the European constitution, we are the ones who will pay the price," said Poland's prime minister Marek Belka, warning that a No vote would jeopardise EU funding on which the new members rely to develop their economies. "Basically, only negative consequences" would follow a French snub of the treaty, Mr Belka said, meaning "less solidarity, less European aid".
While the nations of "old Europe" have wrestled with sluggish economies, the new EU members have grown rapidly, many of them using flat tax rates and low labour and land costs to lure major companies away from Western competitor states.
Latvian foreign minister Artis Pabriks recently said: "It looks as if some have grown afraid of Europe, of the progress and vitality that we are bringing to it."
Competition for jobs and investment will only increase if Romania and Bulgaria join the EU as planned in 2007, and Croatia follows in 2009.
And a long list of other candidates, from Ukraine to Macedonia, is already forming behind Zagreb.
Leading Czech newspaper Hospodarske Noviny concluded that "enlargement malaise" was infecting Western Europe, with France as its most prominent victim.
"Free competition was barely an issue when the EU was only made up of countries with comparable economies. Competition only became a problem with the integration of countries eager for prosperity, with lower labour costs," the newspaper wrote.
"A great number of French . . . dream of a paradise lost when the union was smaller and more homogeneous. The debate on the constitution is a means to vent their discontent."
Of all the new member states however, it is in the Czech Republic that the anti- constitution lobby has its most influential supporter.
"I am not sure what the outcome of the French referendum will be, but I sincerely hope France votes against the constitution," Czech President Vaclav Klaus declared this month, bemoaning a lack of public debate on the contents of the treaty (see panel).
Neighbouring Slovakia recently joined Hungary, Slovenia and Lithuania in ratifying the treaty and, even in the Czech Republic and Poland, where euroscepticism is relatively strong, polls show that supporters of the constitution hold a large majority.
Many critics of the treaty in those countries share the view of Irish academic Anthony Coughlan, whose book criticising the constitution carries a foreword by Klaus.
"It is nonsense to try to impose a political and ideological straitjacket on 25, and soon 27, countries," Coughlan said recently, looking to the accession of Romania and Bulgaria.
"If a smaller country votes against the constitution it will be forced by the EU to vote again, but . . . (if) France rejects the constitution it will essentially be the end of the constitution."