An Eastern Enlargement of the EU: Burden or Blessing? [antikvár]

IntroductionWhen the long awaited collapse of the Berlin wall materialised, most peoplehaving hoped for this were taken by surprise, which later was taken over by fear,uncertainty and ended up in policy paralysis in practical terms. The EuropeanCommunity, whose charter declared openness to all European parliamentarydemocracies and market economies, seems to have been particularly frightened by thebold words and visions of the founding fathers of the 1957 Rome Treaty. Thus theyextended the fairly limited PHARE Programme from Poland and Hungary to all newdemocracies, signed a series of association agreements with them, but resisted anyformulation that would have created a liaison between these and potential future fullmembership [Messerlin, 1992, Wang and Winters, 1994]. Later, especially with the1993 Copenhagen and the 1995 Madrid Council decisions this deadlock could beovercome. However, with the already palpable stagnation of the IGC in Turin even theofficial schedules of a possible Eastern enlargement, with the first round of countriesacceding around 2002-2003 seem optimistic, if only for bureaucratic and proceduralreasons (which include a lengthy and controversial ratification process by thelegislation of 15 incumbents). This means, that under the best of circumstances, thefront-runner countries will have waited for 12 years for their full membership. This iscomparable to the British experience, which was generally considered to be a fairlyarduous journey, especially if one compares it to the Nordic or even the Greekexperience. Against this background it sounds fairly hypocritic when one hears therepeated warnings of the dangers of a premature, overhasty membership of CentralEuropean countries in the EU. If a country is unable or unwilling to create thefeasibility conditions for its joining in a club, whose rules - the acquis - were alreadywell known and even accepted by it at the time of their application for fullmembership1, it is probably just a waste of time to wait and prepare for another 15years.