The EU pre-accession strategies: a political and legal analysis

Abstract

In the EU enlargement procedure, one of the important steps is the Opinion of the European Commission on each application for EU membership. But the Commission’s role in the enlargement process as a whole is in reality much more important than Article 49 TEU (former Article O) at first glance suggests: the Commission has indeed a key position in the preparation of the formulation and implementation of the pre-accession strategies towards the applicant country as well as in the accession negotiations as such.1 Therefore, the request of the 1995 Madrid European Council to the Commission to embark on the drafting of a composite paper on enlargement,2 although unique in itself, was not so astonishing. Already the sheer number of all the applications from the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) — no less than ten have applied for membership — together with the pending applications of Cyprus and Malta,3 and not forgetting Turkey, made the prospect of further enlargement this time something very special and indeed very different from previous enlargements. The next enlargement(s), possibly involving so many different countries with such varying degrees of economic and social development, necessarily raised questions about the preparation of an adequate enlargement framework. Naturally, such considerations quickly have a political, economic and financial dimension.