By Stephen Mulvey BBC News Online

Prepare for plenty of rhetoric when EU leaders meet in Copenhagen at the end of the week - history is going to be made, and they will waste no opportunity to tell us about it.

Poland is a cocktail: of France for its grandeur, of Britain for its Euroscepticism, and Spain for its brutal tactics EU negotiator

Barring a disaster, 10 new states will be invited to join the bloc, eight of them from behind the Iron Curtain that went up after World War II.

The curtain has been gone for a decade, but the former Soviet bloc states are only now being admitted to sit at Europe's top political and economic table, together with Cyprus and Malta.

Hard bargainer: Poland's Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz (left)

This should happen on Friday, but the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has prudently booked the venue right through until Sunday in case of last-minute hitches.

Snags are liable to arise because this particular piece of history is being made amid heated arguments about how much it is going to cost.

The two main camps are:

• The EU's big paymasters, such as Germany, which do not want to stump up more than they have to, especially at a time of economic gloom

• The biggest new recipients of EU funds, such as Poland, which want as good a deal as they can get, to help their farmers compete with those further west.

Diplomats say that they are frankly startled at Poland's uncompromising, no-holds-barred haggling.

"Poland is a cocktail: of France for its spirit of grandeur, of Britain for its Euroscepticism, and Spain for its brutal negotiating tactics," said one official involved in last-minute talks in Brussels this week.

Likely new members

Cyprus Czech Republic Estonia Hungary Latvia Lithuania Malta Poland Slovakia Slovenia

One EU foreign minister said Poland, by far the biggest of the new entrants, was negotiating as though it were up to the other countries "to plead with it to join their club".

Denmark, which holds the EU's rotating presidency until the end of the year, has repeatedly warned that Poland could end up getting left out - and there have been dark hints too about Malta.

"Then we will close [negotiations] with nine or eight countries... and those left behind then risk not getting a second chance until 2007," Mr Rasmussen said on Tuesday.

Underspend

One of the reasons that Poland is still pushing for a better deal is that the EU budgeted in Berlin in 1999 to spend 42.5bn euros on enlargement up to 2006 - and the deal agreed by EU foreign ministers this week will come in some 2bn euros below that.

Possible timetable

December 2002: 10 countries invited to join April 2003: Accession treaty to be signed in Athens May 2004: New members join July 2005: Turkey starts membership talks 2007: Bulgaria and Romania join EU

To the irritation of the Danish presidency and some national governments, the European Commission has entered the fray on the side of the applicants, urging the full amount to be disbursed.

Last-minute sweeteners cannot be ruled out.

The Copenhagen summit will take two more key decisions on enlargement, with regard to:

• Bulgaria and Romania

• Turkey.

It was agreed at the Brussels summit in October that Bulgaria and Romania should be scheduled to join the EU in 2007.

The package to be agreed in Copenhagen will include detailed "road maps" for the accession negotiations, and increased pre-accession aid.

Unlucky Turkey

Of all the countries with a stake in this summit, it seems likely that Turkey is going to emerge from the celebrations with least to smile about.

It wanted a firm date for accession talks to begin, preferably in 2003. What it is most likely to get is the conditional date of July 2005, dependent on it passing a human rights review late in 2004.

It is a big mouthful to take in 10 countries, but not very big compared to the task of admitting Turkey Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Turkey's newly-elected government continued to try hard right up to the last minute, putting a new package of human rights reforms to parliament on the eve of the summit.

But EU leaders are adamant that measures such as the abolition of the death penalty, the outlawing of torture and the granting of cultural and language rights to Kurds and non-Muslims, must be seen to be implemented in practice before membership talks can begin.

One possible silver lining for Turkey is the outside chance of an outline deal to reunify Cyprus.

The UN put forward a revised peace proposal this week, and it is reported that UN-mediated talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriot officials will be held in Copenhagen in parallel with the summit.

Everyone is hoping that Cyprus will join the EU in 2004 as a reunited island. So far 2002 has been a year of disappointment on this score.

What a coup it would be for Copenhagen if it was able to take a second "historic" step forward.