EU heads of government have agreed a deal to finance the Union's expansion.
The deal comes at the end of a two-day summit in Brussels and sets out the funding structure for the EU to take in up to 10 former Soviet bloc and Mediterranean countries by 2004.
"This represents a major step forward towards a historic decision on enlargement which will be taken at the Copenhagen summit in December," Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a news conference.
The summit had been threatened with delay - and possibly failure - over the issue of farm subsidies.
The impasse was apparently broken at a pre-summit meeting yesterday in which French President, Jacques Chirac, and German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, agreed to cap farm subsidies from 2007.
