Critically examine the factors that ultimately led to the enlargement of the EU in 2004. What are the stages and debates?

Résumé du document

According 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. The desire of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Slovenia to be part of the European Union may thus be viewed as legitimate. While 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, in a speech pronounced in Fulton, Churchill spoke for the first time about the iron curtain that fell on Europe. This metaphor was meant to describe the bipolarization of the world, with the enmity between the communist bloc and the capitalist bloc.

Extraits

[...] In fact as Timothy Garton points out, 'almost every argument that was made in the 1970s for admitting the fledging democracies Spain, Portugal and Greece into the EC could be made in the 1990s for, at the very least, Poland, Hungary 4 and the Czech Republic'. The last main factor to the enlargement is independent of both Eastern and Western countries, it is the international context. Since the end of the Cold war and the reinforcement of the United Nations as well as the international cooperation, it seems that the world is dominated by liberalism. Yet it appears that although liberalism is relevant in economy, in the political field, realism is still strongly relevant. [...]

[...] This attitude was not well received in the east, especially knowing that the commercial balance was beneficial to the west. Eastern European countries had the impression that even thought they were in economic difficulties they were used for the economic growth of their neighbours . Western European countries were also afraid of the immigration coming from the former communist countries. This was actually an unjustified argument as in 2000 only 800,000 people came to Western countries. But the negotiations were always put back by France because of the lack of guarantee from Germany on its frontiers . [...]

[...] Its first goal was to reinforce the private economic branch of the Central and Eastern European countries and help the transition to free-market economy . This link between the EU and Eastern Europe was supported by the United States as President Bush thought the western European countries could serve as an 'economic magnet that could pull Eastern Europe towards a new commonwealth of free nations' . As a result of this return to Europe and the influence of the EU on the Central and Eastern 2 European countries, the idea of the enlargement became a serious debate. [...]

[...] 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 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' ? [...]

[...] Nostalgia is a better explanation to the disappearance of euphoria in Eastern Europe. There was a clear feeling of nostalgia for the period of Soviet domination. It was argued that 'for all its fault, perhaps communism had at least kept a lid on historic problems with which Europe would prefer not to deal' . As a result, between 1989 and 1993, the idea of an EU enlargement was very uncertain, and ' Europe once more seemed divided in two: an eastern zone of instability and poverty beset by ethnic tensions and open warfare, and western area, above all the EU, prosperous, if still prone to regionalist movements.' In 1993, as a consequence of internal and external pressures the enlargement was definitely part of the EU's agenda. [...]