COMMENTARY

Spring 2010

by Fritz Breuss

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Mart Laar’s inventory of the most recent EU enlargements is primarily from the newcomers’ viewpoint, and, think it‘s worth contrasting this with a broader view from the EU as a whole.

The EU’s “big bang” enlargement in 2004 that took in 10 new member states, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, is only the provisional endpoint.

The enlargement process goes on; negotiations with Croatia and Turkey are underway (FYR Macedonia is a candidate country) and Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo are potential candidate countries. Iceland after its near-state bankruptcy applied for EU membership last July and Serbia last December. Some of the countries that the EU subsumes under its European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) – an alternative EU strategy to pure enlargement – are also potential EU candidate countries. We could see an EU-40 in the next 10 to 20 years.

The enlarged EU of 27 already has many undoubted merits. Besides the historic and political dimension of the peaceful re-unification of Europe, the Single Market means that nearly 2/3 of EU trade can now be carried out tariff-free, acting as a shield against the dangers of globalisation. And this trade-creating effect helps new EU member states to catch up faster with the income levels of the older member states.

Less positively, the recent enlargements had many flaws and drawbacks. With its 2004 enlargement the EU tried to integrate two completely heterogeneous groups of countries – the rich older EU member states with the poorer new ones that are still in transition. This imposed fresh costs on the EU budget, so in this sense enlargement is a form of development policy. Some critics say that both enlargements were too early, with one of the biggest problems being corruption, and another the economic instability that was dramatically revealed by the present crisis. All the newcomers except Poland suffered deep recession last year, and the Baltic states depression, and unlike the richer older member states didn’t have enough money for fiscal stimuli so some have had to be supported massively by international institutions. The crisis has interrupted the badly needed catching-up process, with consequences we can’t yet judge.