This new book takes a unique approach to the study of European enlargement. It tackles key questions, offering up-to-date studies and country-specific in-depth analyses.

This new book takes a unique approach to the study of European enlargement, tackling key questions. What kind of understanding of the EU do the enlargement processes speak to? Do decisions to enlarge mainly suggest that the EU is a free market, focusing on potential economic gains? Do they indicate that there is a sense of common European identity? Or is the focus primarily on securing respect for democratic principles and human rights? Offering up-to-date studies of the EU enlargement processes and country-specific in-depth analyses, Questioning EU Enlargement will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of European studies, international relations and politics.

This volume suggests new, theoretically informed approaches for historians and social scientists to engage with the policy of enlargement – across rounds and in all its diversity. It follows three approaches: first tracing Longue Durée developments; second, investigating enlargement Beyond the Road to Membership; and third, exploring the Entangled Exchanges and synergies between the EC/EU and its outside. It attempts to properly historicise the process of enlargement with contributions from historians, social scientists and a legal scholar exemplifying suggested approaches and theoretical reflections from the various disciplines.

This text reviews a variety of approaches to the study of the European Union's foreign policy. Much analysis of EU foreign policy contains implicit theoretical assumptions about the nature of the EU and its member states, their inter-relationships, the international system in which they operate and the nature and direction of European integration. In many instances such assumptions, given that they are not discussed openly, curtail rather than facilitate debate. The purpose of this book is to open up this field of enquiry so that students, observers and analysts of EU foreign policy can review a broad range of tools and theoretical templates from which the development and the trajectory of the EU's foreign policy can be studied.

Among the criteria for accession to the European Union are democracy and the Rule of Law. In the insightful analysis offered by the author of this book, these concepts - while admirable and even necessary criteria in principle - are almost impossible to measure, and any judgement grounded in them will always be difficult to justify. In his words, 'by including analysis of democracy and the Rule of Law within the field of the EU enlargement law, the Union entered an unstable terrain of vague causal connections and blurred definitions.' Dr Kochenov addresses this problem by proceeding as follows: 1. Outlining EU enlargement law in general, including the principle of conditionality and the role played by the analysis of democracy and the Rule of Law in enlargement preparation; 2. Focusing on the role actually played by the monitoring of democracy and the Rule of Law in ten candidate countries, scrutinizing the way the EU used the legal tools and competences outlined in its enlargement law. The book adopts the EU's own understanding of democracy and the Rule of Law, as derived directly from the substance of the numerous legal and political instruments issued by the Community Institutions and especially the Commission in the course of the pre-accession process. In this way it demonstrates the actual - as opposed to the officially announced - role played by the assessment of democracy and the Rule of Law in the candidate countries in the regulation of enlargement. Many formidable inconsistencies in the application of the conditionality principle are thus laid bare. This leads the author to a series of recommendations on policy and procedure that he demonstrates could be profitably applied to the regulation of current and future accessions, using the Commission's own structure of monitoring pre-accession reforms in the three areas of the legislature, executive, and judiciary in candidate countries. The probity and soundness of these recommendations, firmly grounded as they are in the actual pre-accession monitoring and its consequences for the pre-accession progress of ten Eastern European countries admitted to the EU in 2004 and 2007, will greatly interest policymakers and scholars concerned with the future of European integration.

Leading international economists assess the effects of the 2004 expansion of the European Union. In May 2004 the European Union will undergo the largest expansion in its history when ten countries -- Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia -- become members. The number of new members and their diversity make this "big bang" enlargement particularly challenging. Not only do these countries vary widely in language, culture, and geography, but also their per capita income is less than half that of existing members. EU officials believe that expanded integration will serve the EU's objectives of peace, stability, prosperity, and democracy; but the less abstract questions of costs and benefits of enlargement are more complex. Each of the chapters in this CESifo volume addresses a different aspect of EU expansion. The contributors, all leading international practitioners and scholars, consider such topics as the effect of euro zone expansion on European Central Bank monetary policy making; using the euro as an external anchor for a national currency; worker migration and income differentials; the Swiss experience with immigration policy in a direct democracy framework; detailed sector analysis using a computable general equilibrium model of the world economy; investment and job creation and destruction in incumbent member countries; and the asymmetric effects of enlargement on high- and low-income incumbent countries. Taken together, the chapters provide useful guidance in shaping the EU policies of the future.

This book explores one of the central challenges facing the EU today – how to reconcile enlargement with the pursuit of a stronger and more effective European Union. While the relationship between widening and deepening has been recognized for years as one of the big questions in the field of European integration, existing theoretical and empirical analyses of this relationship suffer from a variety of shortcomings. This book brings together a group of EU scholars who significantly advance our understanding of the relationship between widening and deepening. The contributors challenge a variety of ‘common wisdoms’ concerning the relationship between widening and deepening and offer nuanced theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between these two vital dimensions of European integration. Collectively, the contributors to this volume offer the most comprehensive picture available to date of the multi-faceted relationship between widening and deepening. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.