In the Commission’s opinion on the accession applications, it succinctly addresses this point in a single sentence, stating that it will assess the impact of the accessions on EU policies later. The EU-27 are also not willing to reconsider the fourth criterium, the EU’s capacity to absorb new members. New members will thus still be subject to the political and economic Copenhagen criteria, as well as the obligation to adopt the EU’s primary and secondary legislation in its entirety upon accession. However, the EU intends to adhere to the second component of the consensus on enlargement: strict conditionality. If we judge the EU at face value, it is heading for 37-plus members, which will “change the face of Europe forever” (German Chancellor Scholz). Now, the EU’s commitment to the Trio resembles its commitment to the Western Balkans in its 2003 Thessaloniki political pledge. One reason was that most Western governments had never officially recognised the annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia by Moscow in 1940–41, not even during the Cold War. Of the post-Soviet states, only the three Baltic countries were included in the programme, as they were also, later, in the dual enlargement of NATO and the EU. The EU thus also exceeded the area for enlargement that it had set itself in the 1990s with the PHARE aid programme for the countries of Eastern Central and South-Eastern Europe. With its Brussels decision, the EU abandoned consolidation, which it defined as restricting any promises of future accession to the six countries of the Western Balkans plus Turkey.
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