European Union Enlargement a Success?

This article provides an excellent look at the issues surrounding recent and possible future enlargement of the European Union. To continue reading the article, click on the title of the post.

Fraught at the frontiers: why Europe is losing faith in its most successful policy

By George Parker and Daniel Dombey

Published: December 13 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 13 2006 02:00, Financial Times

Jean Monnet, one of the European Union's 1950s founding fathers, foretold that in a globalised era, size would count. "Our countries have become too small for the world . . . measured against America and Russia today and China and India tomorrow," he once said.

Europe's leaders have since sought to expand the EU in line with this vision. But enlargement, often cited as the club's most successful policy, has become a political liability. Tomorrow, at a summit in Brussels, the EU's member governments will clash over how much further - and how quickly - the Union can extend to the east.

The debate will raise questions about what it means to be European and whether the EU can carry on growing without grinding to a halt or further alienating its citizens. The outcome and tone of the talks will have hard-edged consequences: is it going to become even tougher for candidates to join the club?

Senior EU officials say this is a dangerous moment. If the bloc sends out negative signals to future members, what consequences could it have for reformers in Turkey, the politically unstable Balkans or former Soviet republics such as Belarus or Ukraine? The world has a stake in the message that comes out of Brussels.

The end-of-year summit gives European leaders a chance to take stock of the club's "big bang" expansion of May 2004, which saw it expand from 15 to 25 members. By the time Bulgaria and Romania join on New Year's day, the EU will have taken in 10 former communist countries and increased its population to 490m, almost half as big again as the US.

So what went wrong with the latest enlargement? The simple answer is: not very much. While some western European countries, including Britain and Ireland, experienced unexpectedly high levels of immigration from Poland and other new member states, economic studies say the migrants filled skills shortages.

Indeed, the creation of a mobile pool of labour - giving Europe's economy some of the flexibility taken for granted in the US - seems to have played a role in pushing EU economic growth above 2.5 per cent, outstripping America. Unemployment across the bloc has at last started falling....