EU Enlargement 1989-2009: Actors, Institutions, and Literature

• Main Author: O'Brennan, John
• Other Authors: Mueller, Wolfgang
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Sage 2012
• Subjects: Sociology; North Finland
• Online Access: https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/2906/; https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/2906/1/JOB_EU_Enlargement.pdf

On 1 May 2004 at a historic, if understated, signing ceremony in Dublin the European Union (EU) formally recognized the accession to the Union of ten new states. These were the Mediterranean ‘micro’ states of Cyprus and Malta, and eight new members from Central and Eastern Europe(CEE) –the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia – which, for more than fifty years, had been cut off from the European integration process by virtue of their geopolitical imprisonment behind the Iron Curtain. The eastern enlargement was completed via the ‘coda enlargement’, with the accessions of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. At that point the EU completed its extraordinary and cumulative geographic sweep: the first enlargement in 1973 was ‘west’ (UK, Ireland and Denmark), the emphasis in the 1980s was on the ‘south’ (Spain, Portugal and Greece); in the 1990s the Union expanded ‘north’ (Finland, Sweden and Austria). The history of European integration has been one of successive and successful enlargement rounds; ‘widening’ has proved as potent a force as ‘deepening’ in determining how the European Union has evolved as a post-national inter-state and supra-state zone of peace and relative prosperity. For more than three decades after World War Two, the Cold War stood in the way of the realization of the oft-stated ambition to unite ‘east’ and ‘west’ in a single European constellation of states. But with the demise of the Soviet Union and the loosening of its post- War grip on its Central and Eastern European satellite states in the wake of 1989’s so-called ‘geopolitical earthquake’, Jean Monnet’s ambition of a European construction stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals suddenly seemed possible. Thereafter, enlargement quickly made its way to the top of the European Union’s political agenda. Two decades later the EU has applied the successful model of ‘Europeanization East’ in negotiating with states in the Western Balkans and Turkey, though with less than successful results to date. Thus ...