Central and Eastern Europe on the Way into the European Union [antikvár]

In 1996, those countries of Central and Eastern Europe associated with the European Union have further Consolidated their democratic institutions and made economic progress. The starting position for the integration into the European Union has thus further improved. At the same time, however, it becomes manifest that, to date, none of these states has fully met the necessary economic and legal requirements for EU membership. While at the beginning of the transformation process macroeconomic stabilisadon had been of major importance, in 1996 priority was given to institutional and legal reforms, consistent further development of competition policy, the stabilisadon of the bank and credit systems, the establishment of functioning social systems as weil as the extension of the infrastructure. All of the ten associated countries have already formally applied for membership of the European Union, the last one having been Slovenia in June 1996. As, however, up to now future rounds of eastern enlargement have been determined neither time-wise nor in terms of the course to be taken, the membership perspective for the Central and Eastern European countries remains unclear. EU membership will not take place before a structural reform of the EU, which is still to come, i.e. certainly not before the year 2000. According to the decision of the Madrid Summit of December 1995, first negotiations for membership are to be started six months after the end of the IGC, i.e. presumably at the end of 1997/beginning of 1998. In order to prepare the integration it is necessary to find out the state of political, legal and economic reforms in the Central and Eastern European states, and to identify the problems in the individual countries. A sober and critical stock-taking could show starting points for specific western support and offer additional information for the negotiations and the related political decisions. The present report analyses the integration capacity of the ten associated states. It is published annually within the framework of the project "Strategies for Europe", which is jointly realised by the Bertelsmann Science Foundation and the Research Group on European Affairs at the Center for Applied Policy Studies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. In ten country reports experts comment on the political, economic and social developments in 1995/96. They follow a given catalogue of criteria which was worked out by the project partners in cooperation with the European Commission. The country reports are complemented by an introduction, which gives a short summary of the most important problems of integration in