Enlarging the European Union: Challenges to and from Central and Eastern Europe—Introduction
| Author | Martin Rhodes,Susan Senior Nello,Luciano Bardi |
| Date | 01 July 2002 |
| Published date | 01 July 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512102023003001 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Enlarging the European Union: Challenges to and
from Central and Eastern Europe—Introduction
LUCIANO BARDI, MARTIN RHODES, AND SUSAN SENIOR NELLO
The European Union’s enlargement towards Central and Eastern European (CEE)
countries is a highly complex issue and one that has dominated the politics of
Europe’s pan-regional relations for the last decade. The process that could
eventually lead to EU accession by ten or more states of the former Eastern bloc
and Yugoslavia informally began with the first manifestations of Euro-enthusiasm
from the new-born CEE democracies (particularly Poland and Hungary) in the
early 1990s. It was officially inaugurated in June 1993 at the Copenhagen
European Council when the European Union officially set out its definition of EU
membership criteria in response to CEE country requests to join the EU club.
Formal EU accession applications started shortly thereafter: Hungary and Poland
applied in March and April 1994, respectively, followed by the Slovak Republic,
Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic
(see Henderson, 1999).
From early on, the enthusiasm of those in the queue for membership was met
with encouragement from those already inside the Union. Initially, and
throughout the first half of the 1990s, EU member states exhibited generally
positive attitudes towards enlargement, but mainly for reasons of stability and
international security. Economic motives then were of secondary importance. The
mood surrounding enlargement at the time was captured by Kaiser and Brüning
(1996: 11) who described it as “the most extensive piece of unfinished business in
the grand European project [. . .] fundamentally changing the nature of interstate
relations in Europe conceived by the pioneers of European unification in the late
1940s and early 1950s.” For the first time, the notion of a finally secure and united
Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals” appeared to be an attainable objective and
not just an instrumental slogan used by Eurosceptics to criticize the limited,
“Western” EU. These stability and security considerations were to dominate the
political debate until 1997, while the practicalities of enlargement were barely
broached, with only some EU member states expressing concern at their
implications. But at the Amsterdam European Council held in June that year, the
principle that enlargement was now inevitable seemed to be accepted—even by
International Political Science Review (2002), Vol 23, No. 3, 227–233
0192-5121 (2002/07) 23:3, 227–233; 023895 © 2002 International Political Science Association
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