Critically examine the factors that ultimately led to the enlargement of the EU in 2004. What are the stages and debates?
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european union
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published 25/07/2006
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SummaryAccording to the article 43 of the European Community treaty, 'any European State may apply to become a member of the Union[...]the conditions of admission and the adjustments to the Treaties on which the Union is founded which such admission entails shall be the subject of an agreement between the member states and the applicant states'. Geographically, Europe can be defined as 'the western peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, stretching from Iceland in the west to the Urals in the east, and from Pitzbergen or Novya Zemlaya in the north to Gibraltar in the south' . Therefore, the will of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Slovenia to be part of the European Union was legitimate. If the old continent demonstrates some unity, the gap between the west and the east shows that diversity remains the main feature of Europe. On the 5th of March 1946, Churchill, in a speech pronounced in Fulton, talked for the first time about the iron curtain that fell on Europe. This metaphor was meant to describe the bipolarisation of the world, with the opposition of the communist bloc and the capitalist bloc. At the end of the Cold War and
the fall of communism, the metaphor should have become obsolete. Yet the inequalities and the antagonisms between Western and Central and Eastern Europe are still in 1991 very strong and the separation between the capitalist European states and the former communist states remains clear. Nevertheless, 13 years later, countries which had been under Moscow's sphere of influence become part of the European Union.
What are the factors that led to the 2004 EU enlargement? As all waves of integration, the process is not simple and never certain. Which were the main stages and the debate in this enlargement? How
and why has the EU enlargement 'progressed from a utopian vision to a practical, and vastly ambitious, project' ?
Table of Contents
- At the end of the Cold War, the Eastern European countries were finally autonomous
- Concerning the economy, Central and Eastern European countries were deeply affected by the past
- Despite the closeness between the EU and the former communist countries, the idea of the enlargement was uncertain
- In 1993, as a consequence of internal and external pressures the enlargement was definitely part of the EU's agenda
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