Slobodan, a Slovenian folk musician  The former lead singer of Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, has composed a new European anthem, Ça Ira ("It's going to be fine"), which was due to be performed at midnight last night at bashes across Europe to mark EU enlargement. I haven't heard the song, but calling it "It's Going to Be Fine" is surely asking for trouble.  Party planners in Berlin had a more imaginative idea. At midnight last night, a choir from the British embassy was due to perform a folk song from each of the 10 new accession countries. Folk music derives from the core of a country's being: to celebrate national diversity, and European unity, in this way seems more fitting than a new Euro tune.  Eastern European states have a long-established folk tradition. Folk music was always a national unifier, particularly for countries trying to resist invasion. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania spent the best part of the 20th century resisting Soviet and, for a short period, Nazi rule. Folk music drew each nation together. "Folk songs and politics are closely linked," says Malcolm Taylor, of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.  They were never more closely harmonised than in the "singing revolution", which contributed to the downfall of the Soviet empire. It began in 1988, when 300,000 Estonians gathered in Tallinn to sing national songs.  Folk songs draw on entrenched national characteristics. Vic Gammon, senior lecturer in popular and world music at Leeds University, quotes philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, who said folk expressed the "soul of a nation's people".  But does it? Certainly, the songs performed in Berlin are wildly different. Slovenia's song, "Venci Bejli", from a country whose people are renowned for their sentimentality and melancholy, is a solemn piece; its lyrics translate as: "If my tear fell on a stone, the stone would shatter." Elsewhere, "Tris Mejtinas", Latvia's folk song, tells of three girls who attempt to swim across a river and one drowns. Estonia's is a hearty reaping song, and from Cyprus, "Psindri" is a sunny ode to basil and marjoram.  "Folk songs are distinctive , but there are no intrinsic links nowadays between the music and a nation's character," says Gammon.  You can go only so far with national stereotypes, says Mike Bolton of the British embassy, who sourced the 10 songs with the help of a Bonn-based folk music organisation, Die Klingende Brücke. "There are stereotypes within these countries, just as there are between the Irish, Scottish and English, but that's as far as it goes," he says. On the positive side, distinctive national cultures can enrich a multicultural society like Europe and, more importantly, help preserve their independence, which is what Berlin's Kulturjahr is hoping to demonstrate. "We wanted to show that the different cultures [from the new states] can enrich the European scene," says Zsuzsa Breier, who is organising the event. "People often perceive artists who don't work in a global, America-led vernacular as conservative or old-fashioned. But Hungarian, Slavic and Baltic cultures of romantic myth, tradition and emotion have an important role to play today."  Culture is not just a decorative sideshow to the real politics of enlargement, Breier says. "Generations that have grown up in these countries under independence are more similar. Pop music homogenises them. It's only in art, music or literature where national identity still plays an important role.  "[But] many young people don't want to be part of mainstream global culture, they want to be self-consciously European and rediscover their cultural roots," she believes.  The threat of Soviet or Nazi invasion may have passed, but the threat from the EU to these countries' independent cultural identity is all too real. Could folk music grow in stature as a result?  "Indigenous music certainly has a positive role in maintaining a nation's identity today," says Gammon. "People still need cultural markers. Folk music could well become more popular as these countries seek to retain their diversity amid globalisation."  If only England could. "Englishness has, to a large extent, been appropriated by the rightwing, and the English have always been awkward about preserving and performing their folk music," he says. Perhaps that's why the best we can offer the 10 new states is Roger Waters.
Want to find out more about the 10 new Euro states? Just listen to their folk songs, says Hannah Booth