According to George Orwell's damning parody of the hypocrisy of Communism, Animal Farm, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

Sixty years on, some European citizens - many of whom endured decades of Communist misrule - are asking whether a similar motto should not apply to them in 2007.

"In any people, in any community, there are offenders, but the law must be applied in their case, without national hysteria emerging against an entire community," Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu said in an emotional address in early November.

Tariceanu was reacting to a wave of attacks on Romanians in Italy - a wave impelled by the brutal murder of a woman in Rome, allegedly by a Romanian illegal immigrant.

The incident sparked a heated debate in Italy, with senior political figures saying that Romania's January accession to the EU had flooded Italy with beggars and criminals.

Those comments were fiercely resented by Romanians, who saw them as a blatant attempt to brand the whole nation as criminal.

But they fed into a growing debate within the EU as to which European countries - current, future and potential members - are safe, reliable and genuinely "European" states.

It comes as the EU's Schengen passport-free zone expands to take in nine of the Central and European states which joined the EU in 2004, together with Malta.

Despite the fact that those states have already been EU members for three and a half years, the move has triggered a wave of disquiet along the line of the former Iron Curtain.

"I don't trust them. They're much poorer than we are," a German woman in her 20s who identified herself as Kerstin said when asked about the impending opening of the Schengen borders.

She was speaking of the Poles, but citizens all along the soon-to-open borders have made similar comments about their neighbours.

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