(AFP) - European leaders from both sides of the defunct Iron Curtain Friday marked the expansion of the Schengen passport-free travel zone to nine mostly ex-communist states, saying it was one more step to ending old divides.
"Today, along with the elimination of internal border controls, the citizens of nine European countries have lost their last reason to say,'I'm going to Europe' when leaving home to visit Paris, Rome or Lisbon," said Toomas Hendrik Ilves , president of Estonia, which was ruled by the Soviet Union for five decades after World War II.
"We are at home, our common European home," he said during a ceremony at the port of Tallinn.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the expansion of the passport-free zone was "symbolic because it was almost unthinkable what we are living today, some years ago", before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
"Sometimes we use the word historic too easily, but this is indeed an historic moment," he said.
Barroso noted that no border checks mean not only freer travel for people, but also for goods.
"Less time means less costs, means our economies can become more competitive," he said.
Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen of Finland, who arrived by ferry from Helsinki for the ceremony, told AFP the the zone's expansion "unites the union in a genuine way".
Border controls were abolished at midnight Friday as eastern Europe's Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, as well as the Mediterranean island of Malta, joined 15 nations, including Finland, already in the Schengen Treaty.
Estonian authorities decked the Tallinn port arrivals hall with the slogan: "No more passports. Just pass the port."
Estonia, which regained its independence from the crumbling Soviet bloc in 1991, was one of the eight ex-communist countries that joined the EU in 2004, giving its citizens visa-free access to western Europe.
Schengen is a bonus, because Estonia's 1.3 million inhabitants, like those of the other newcomer states, can now travel from the Arctic Circle in Norway to Portugal without showing a passport, although airport checks will remain in place until March.
"This is a great day for Estonia, and also for eastern Europeans, because the division of Europe is over," Estonian Interior Minister Juri Pihl told AFP.
The huge expansion means that the population of the free-movement zone has reached 400 million.
Elsewhere in Europe, other leaders hailed the zone's enlargement.
"This is an historic moment for which we have been waiting for a long time," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in the small town of Zittau on the German-Polish-Czech border.
"Those of us who are a little older know that such freedom is not something we could take for granted," said Merkel, who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in the former East Germany.
"This is one further step towards European integration," said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose country's 646-kilometre border with Germany is one of the most bitterly contested in Europe's history.
Slovenia's foreign minister meanwhile said his country's entry into the passport-free zone had ended any animosity with neighbouring Austria.
"At the border we will have a friend, not an enemy," Dmitrij Rupel said during a ceremony at a tunnel on a highway, marking the border between Slovenia and Austria.
"The lifting of barriers is a further meaningful step towards rapprochement and mutual trust," Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said, noting that it came barely 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The Schengen expansion has taken years of preparation and the European Union estimates that about one billion euros (1.4 billion dollars) has been spent on improving security on the zone's new outer frontiers.
Security services in some of the old Schengen states, notably Germany and Austria, have warned that the lifting of border controls could trigger a crime wave.
But European Commissioner Franco Frattini , who is responsible for security issues, downplayed the worries, noting that police cooperation has been strengthened to allow cross-border surveillance and pursuit of suspects over frontiers.