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Analysis: Where Does Europe's Enlargement End?

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  • Analysis: Where Does Europe's Enlargement End?

    Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic
    May 3 2004

    Analysis: Where Does Europe's Enlargement End?


    By Luke Allnutt


    (Click here to see RFE/RL's "EU Expands Eastward" webpage.)

    The European Union has always remained deliberately vague about where
    its borders lie. Provided countries fulfill the 1993 Copenhagen
    criteria -- guaranteeing the rule of law, human rights, and respect for
    minorities, as well as having a functioning market economy --
    technically anyone can join. In the late 1980s, Morocco -- with its
    eyes on the market just 16 kilometers across the Straits of Gibraltar
    -- applied to join the union, only to be told it was not European
    enough.

    Following the accession of 10 mostly Central and Eastern European
    countries on 1 May, one of the big questions is: Where next? If all
    goes well, Romania and Bulgaria (and possibly Croatia) will join in
    2007. In the event that they meet the demands of Copenhagen, the
    remaining countries of the western Balkans and Turkey are probably next
    on the list, perhaps sometime in the next decade.

    After that, the choices become less palatable. Ukraine is still trying
    to make the right noises, but its enthusiasm for reforms remains
    laconic at best. Moldova, Europe's poorest country, has a flimsy civil
    society and a glacial pace of reform. It is burdened by Transdniester
    -- a pro-Russian breakaway region that is a lawless paradise for
    gangsters and arms dealers. Belarus, hamstrung by the erratic populism
    of autocratic President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and its unreformed
    Soviet-style economy, is a particularly unattractive prospect.

    Farther east, there are the countries of the South Caucasus: Armenia,
    Azerbaijan, and Georgia. The latter's "Rose Revolution" in November
    brought the region back onto policymakers' radar screens, but
    subsequent tensions over the breakaway republic of Adjaria represent a
    major step backward for Georgia. Armenia's strongman president, Robert
    Kocharian, has meanwhile responded ruthlessly to public demands that he
    respect the courts and the ballot box. Azerbaijan remains isolated from
    the European family over shortcomings like the continuing battle for
    Nagorno-Karabakh, the government's stubborn refusal to release
    political prisoners, and a general lack of respect for democracy and
    human rights. The stakes in the CIS are considerably higher, as those
    former communist countries are part of Russia's "near abroad." With
    that in mind, it is difficult to imagine these countries joining the EU
    in anything less than two decades.

    That is not necessarily a gloomy prognosis. John Palmer, the political
    director of the Brussels-based European Policy Center, thinks that
    after the countries of the western Balkans get accepted, "we might see
    the end of classic enlargement."

    The recurring nightmare for many European politicians is that the
    inclusion of dubious democracies would seriously discredit the
    union.That could usher in a multispeed Europe -- one that allows for a
    certain amount of differentiation. European politicians have always
    balked at the term, for all its connotations of a Europe divided
    between dunces and high-flyers. More recently it has been seen as
    French President Jacques Chirac's Plan B -- an opportunity for France
    and Germany to forge ahead with an inward-looking European agenda after
    the failure of the European constitution talks late last year.

    Yet a multispeed EU might be the only way the union can expand further
    while maintaining the standards laid out in the acquis communautaire
    and not overstretching the purse strings of the richest member states.
    The recurring nightmare for many European politicians is that the
    inclusion of dubious democracies -- like Moldova or Ukraine -- would
    seriously discredit the union. The EU would become an ailing franchise,
    the political equivalent of a fast-food giant letting any old greasy
    spoon hang its global logo above the door. Even the Eurovision song
    contest would garner more respect on the international stage.

    Early signs of the EU's willingness to embrace differentiation can be
    seen in the Wider Europe program, which is a framework for countries in
    the western NIS and southern Mediterranean who will soon find
    themselves sharing a border with the union. Countries in the Wider
    Europe program have been offered the prospect of full participation in
    the EU's market and its four fundamental freedoms -- goods, capital,
    services, and, eventually, people -- provided they adhere to certain
    core values and show concrete progress in political, economic, and
    institutional reforms. The ethos of the program is "Integration, Not
    Membership."

    In the future, if the EU abandoned its open-door policy, states on the
    fringes of the union would not become full members of the union, but
    there would be some elements of shared sovereignty. Europe might become
    what has been termed a "union of concentric circles," with an inner
    core that accepts the acquis communautaire in full, monetary union, the
    Common Agricultural Policy, and then wider circles of countries
    accepting decreasing levels of commitment.

    Europe a la carte exists already to some degree, most notably with the
    single currency, and the European Policy Center's Palmer says these
    types of ad hoc alliances and groupings will become more common.
    Countries will club together and pursue various shared policy
    interests.

    There are several significant problems with such a differentiated
    approach. The first, according to Jonathan Lipkin, an analyst for
    Oxford Analytica writing for EUObserver.com, is "how overlapping
    coalitions of states could find a way to put in place coherent and
    effective administrative and enforcement mechanisms."

    The second is that prospective partners, or members, might not go for
    an "accession lite." Anything less than full membership "just doesn't
    do it for these countries. It's not enough," says Gergana Noutcheva, an
    enlargement expert at the Center for European Policy Studies in
    Brussels. And as financier and philanthropist George Soros wrote in a
    syndicated column for Project Syndicate in March, "The most powerful
    tool that the EU has for influencing political and economic
    developments in neighboring countries is the prospect of membership."

    Further expansion will also require a good deal of housekeeping. The
    brouhaha about the draft constitution in December illustrated the
    shortcomings of the decision-making process within a larger union.
    Without reform, the situation would only get worse. "The bigger the EU
    gets, the national veto will become more a source of paralysis," Palmer
    says. That means the union will have to rely more heavily on qualified
    majority voting (QMV) in the future.

    The likelihood and extent of further expansion (in terms of political
    will and popular tolerance) will depend largely on how this most recent
    wave goes. Enlargement fatigue has already set in. The richest EU
    states are worried about the cost of integration and are currently
    sparring with the European Commission about capping the budget.
    Europeans outside the Euro-elite tend to be lukewarm about EU
    expansion. According to a November Eurobarometer poll, 54 percent of
    the French public opposed enlargement.

    It would only take a few high-level scandals (diseased Slovak chickens
    or embezzled structural funds earmarked for a children's hospital in
    Poznan, perhaps) for the mood to swing further against enlargement.
    Britain's recent backpedaling over migration after a few scaremongering
    stories in the tabloid press about the imminent arrival of
    job-stealing, welfare-sapping Eastern Europeans showed the impact that
    public opinion can have on government policy.
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