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.

Enlargement has been an almost constant part of European integration history – going from an improvised exercise to the EU’s most developed foreign policy tool. However, neither the longevity nor the complexity of enlargement has been properly historicised. European Enlargement across Rounds and Beyond Borders offers three interdisciplinary, innovative, and indeed radical, new ways of understanding and analysing EC/EU enlargements: 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. This edited volume will provide fresh perspectives on enlargement as one of the defining processes in Europe in the second half of the 20th century: How are we to understand enlargement as a policy? How has it changed the EU? What is the historical role of the British press in shaping the UK’s visions of Europe? How has enlargement played into Russia’s relationship with today’s EU? Giving answers to these questions, and many more, this volume wishes to spark a broad debate about the roots, range, and repercussions of enlargement, and how historians, and other scholars, should engage with it. This publication will be of key interest to scholars and students of modern European history and politics, the European integration process, EU studies, and more broadly multilateral international institutions, history, law and the social sciences.

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 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.

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.