Athens, Greece ? Key European leaders proclaimed a leap forward for continental unity Wednesday, welcoming 10 members to the European Union and teaming up to urge a central United Nations role in postwar Iraq.

Seeking to end months of acrimony, Britain, France, Spain and Germany drafted a joint statement on the U.N. role in reconstructing Iraq and urged Washington to maintain law and order in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s ouster.

On the sidelines of a ceremony at which former Eastern bloc nations signed EU accession treaties, the four EU nations with seats on the U.N. Security Council also asked Washington to publish a long-delayed “road map” to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Officials said the aim was for the 15 current EU leaders, along with visiting Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, to endorse the statements on Iraq and the Middle East before the summit ends today.

French President Jacques Chirac said the initiative was a bid to outline principles for reconstructing and stabilizing Iraq “with a central role for the United Nations. We are all agreed on that.”

The EU head office would take charge of organizing an airlift “so we can take the (war) wounded to European hospitals, notably children who cannot be adequately treated locally,” Chirac said without providing any further details.

The 10 joining nations will bring 75 million people into the EU — raising its population to 450 million. The newcomers’ wealth ranges from barely 29 percent of the EU average in Lithuania to 85 percent in Cyprus.

The bloc’s most daring expansion was accompanied by declarations of unity at a ceremony in a colonnaded museum below the Acropolis.

“The European Union is finally overcoming the division of the European continent into East and West, the political division of its states and the painful division of its people that arose as a result of World War II,” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said.