576 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20IO of ongoing repression inCzechoslovakia. The significance of domestic opposi tion inCzechoslovakia is important. Charter 77was themain domestic dissi dent organization from the 1970s onward. Far from being a revolutionary movement, Charter 77 merely called on the Communist Czechoslovak Government to enforce itsown laws, especially theHelsinki provisions ithad committed itselfto.After some dispute among the exiles, theCouncil of Free Czechoslovakia finally decided to support the activities of Charter 77. It can be said that theCouncil did itsbest towork with the domestic opposition and democratically-minded sympathizers in other countries to stand up for the rights of Czechoslovaks behind the Iron Curtain from its founding in 1949 until the collapse of Communism in 1989. In his conclusion, Povolny makes this abundandy clear to the reader. Copies of original documents appended at the end of thework add to its scholarly integrity,as do theEnglish-language summary and the index. Mojmir Povolny has produced an excellent work, which will surely broad en the horizons of all who read it.The younger generations of the post-Cold War Czech Republic and Slovakia would do well to familiarize themselves with the sacrifices of true democrats at home and abroad. Though many political, economic and social factors actually contributed to the collapse of Communism in Europe, the effortsof those who devoted their lives to the restoration of freedom in theirhomeland should never be forgotten. Faculty ofSocial Sciences Charhs University Francis D. Raska Vassiliou, George (ed.). The Accession Story:The EU from ij to 25 Countr?es. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2007. viii + 386 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Index. ?50.00. The accession of ten states to the European Union in May 2004 has already generated a wealth of scholarship. Indeed, the shelves of academics specializing in EU enlargement already buckle under the sheer volume of books and articles devoted to the fifth wave of expansion and itsconsequenc es for the development of the European project. Some of these accounts are strikingfor their theoretical and conceptual advances, others for theirdetailed analysis of particular policy areas. Given the cornucopia ofmaterial, do we need another book? The AccessionStoryoffers the reader neither profound conceptualizations nor purple prose; rather it offers a unique set of perspectives. George Vassiliou, who led Cyprus's negotiation team, has collected together not just his fellow negotiators, but also key figuresfrom theCommission and Council to tell the inside storyof how their statesmade it into theEuropean club. For this reason alone the book deserves to be read, although readers need to prepare them selves to navigate through a book which contains more than its fair share of platitudinous statements, and ? in the case of a couple of chapters ? awkward and clumsy prose in need of better editing. But these are minor quibbles. Whilst Vassiliou could perhaps have been more active inweeding out some of the sentences which bear only a passing resemblance to the REVIEWS 577 English language, he deserves to be lavished with praise for persuading such a distinguished line-up of authors to contribute. Indeed, themerit of the book lies as much inwho has written the chapters as in any of the actual contents. Amongst the best contributions are those written by Poul Skytte Christoffersen who was Denmark's Ambassador to theEU from 1995 to 2003. In a series of chapters, he charts the process of accession, through all of its twistsand turns from the Copenhagen European Council in 1993when the eponymous criteria were promulgated to the summit in the same city nine years laterwhere negotiations were concluded and the ten stateswere almost home and dry (the accession treaties stillhad to be signed and ratified).He highlights how the process was affected not just by the preferences, strategies and tactics of the EU and accession states' negotiating teams, but also some of the internal differences between theMember States. Many of the challenges were common to all the accession states, but some of the thorniest issues were specific to each case, often related to sensitive sectors of their respective economies such as steel and shipyards. In the case of Lithuania, for example, Petras Austrevicius examines two of the issues which dominated the accession of his country: Kaliningrad and...