The accession of twelve Central, Eastern and Southern European states to the EU in 2004 and 2007 marks the most comprehensive round of enlargement in terms of population, territory and number of states. Even while finalizing the accession negotiations with these countries, the EU launched the Stabilisation and Association
78 By institutional boundaries, I mean socially constructed principles, norms, rules and procedures about the inclusion and exclusion of actors in an international society, i.e. expectations about membership.
They should be regarded as separate from geopolitical, transactional and cultural boundaries of a region (Smith 1996).
181 process with states from the Western Balkan that have expressed a wish to join the Union. As accession candidates or prospective candidates, these and other states enjoy a special relationship with the EU without having officially joined. Roughly in parallel to these processes of formal admission, the EU developed a political framework for its relations with those states on its newly extended borders that have not been granted a membership perspective. The participants in this European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), officially launched in 2003, can participate in a number of important aspects of EU integration, ranging from free trade to security cooperation and, theoretically, full access to the Single Market. By consequence, they acquire an ambiguous status between formal membership and non-membership (Smith 2005). The overall picture of the EUʼs new borders is thus ‘fuzzy’ and the finality of its extension is unclear (Christiansen et al. 2000; Diez 2006; Tonra 2010).
The Eastern Enlargement and the launch of the ENP mark a milestone in the pathway of the EC/EUʼs enlargement, which had started with the accession by Denmark, Ireland and the UK in 1973. In the attempts to explain this complex set of outcomes, the formal enlargement of the EU has been the object of much scholarly attention. Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005b) have provided a comprehensive overview of this body of literature. Drawing on and expanding on their summary, one can find analyses from virtually all theoretical vantage points, including legal (Ott and Inglis 2002), institutionalist (Sedelmeier 2011), governance (Christiansen et al. 2000;
Friis and Murphy 1999), realist (Skålnes 2005), political-economy (Mattli 1999: 80–
105; Moravcsik and Vachudova 2003), game-theoretical (König and Bräuninger 2004), constructivist (Fierke and Wiener 2005, Schimmelfennig 2005a, 2005b) and theoretically pluralistic (Smith 1996; Zielonka 2001, 2002a, 2006) perspectives. While some of these studies explicitly set out to explain enlargement processes from the EU macro perspective, others focus on the politics of individual applicant and member states, on specific policy areas or on the impact of enlargement (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005a). A similar pluralism is also present in works on the ENP, as the edited volume by Whitman and Wolff (2010b) demonstrates.
A few authors have also applied English School concepts to questions of EU enlargement; however, they largely focus on the consequences of enlargement for the structure of the European international society (Diez and Whitman 2002a; Stivachtis and Webber 2011) and hardly offer explanatory narratives. In this respect,
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Schimmelfennigʼs (2005a: 47) conceptualization of enlargement as the ‘expansion of international community’ is more illuminating. Schimmelfennig maintains that enlargement followed an essentially normative logic: the EU expanded to include those states that best conformed to certain of its core norms. This resonates with the concept of the standard of civilization, which was famously introduced to the English School by Gong (1984a) as a means to analyze the accession of new states into international society.
Picking up on this idea and linking it to the framework of primary and secondary institutions, I argue in this section that the specific trajectory of the EUʼs Eastern Enlargement, broadly understood, was informed by a set of primary institutions that EU actors constructed as a ‘standard of membership’. The individual institutions that made up the standard can be seen as ‘externalizations’ of certain internal institutions. This standard of membership constituted the context for the secondary institutionalization, which manifested itself in the diverse frameworks for preparing accession (the pre-accession strategy and the Stabilisation and Association Process), realizing pre-accession (the relevant articles in the EC/EU Treaties and the Accession Treaties) or providing alternatives to accession (the ENP and its Action Plans). The secondary institutions defining membership are thus shaped by the broader normative discourses surrounding a regional organization.
Unlike Schimmelfennig, however, I do not conceive of the standard of enlargement as a fixed catalogue of unmalleable core norms, which are mainly an externalization of important domestic political principles. This essentialist assumption is problematic for two reasons: first, it ignores the historical political processes that have led to the formulation and interpretation of certain principles and norms as core conditions for membership in the ‘liberal community’ (Thomas 2006). After all, even the most fundamental of the EUʼs membership criteria, that candidates dispose of democratic institutions, was not an explicit accession condition from the start. Second, the description of this community as fixed and monolithic overlooks to what extent its
183 boundaries are in fact fuzzy and ‘fray out’ from an organizational core to the periphery.79
7.1.1 Institutional context
The European international society initially did not have very elaborate institutions with respect to membership. When the issue of British membership arose in the late 1960s, the EC could apply some basic conditions and procedures but the question was eventually resolved on political grounds, as de Gaulle, whose French government had rejected the first British application, left office. In this section, I outline the primary and secondary institutions with respect to enlargement as it existed around that time, as well as the feedback effects stabilizing this institutional configuration. The subsequent section then discerns different phases of institutional change in the enlargement process.
Primary institutions
This overview presents the ECʼs initial standard of membership, which encompasses those primary institutions that draw boundaries by explicitly describing qualities an actor must have acquired to be considered a potential member of the European international society in general and the EC as its main regional organization in particular. Not all of a regional international societyʼs internal primary institutions must form part of this standard of membership. For example, the notion of pooled sovereignty could not have become part of the ECʼs standard by definition as it consisted of principles and norms applying to the organizationʼs internal constitution.
Hence, an actor could only be socialized into the principles and norms after being accepted as a member state.
As the founding document of the EC, the Treaty of Rome is quite inclusive about who may accede, at least if taken by the letter. It describes membership as open to any European state. In that, it follows the Schumann Declaration, which foresaw the coal and steel organization as being “open to the participation of the other countries of Europe” (Schuman 1950; see also Hillion 2011: 188). As a principled expectation about legitimate actorness, this can be read as an expression of a primary institution of
79 From a comparative vantage point, one could add that the idea can hardly be applied to regional organizations with a membership that displays a large heterogeneity with respect to domestic political institutions such as ASEAN.
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Europeanism, which defines the organization as the representative of an international society covering all of the region and, by consequence, as open to potentially all European states. This claim was upheld in principle despite the factual exclusion of Soviet bloc states from the very beginning of the ECʼs existence. The geographical dimension of this part of the standard became obvious when Moroccoʼs membership application was rejected in 1987.
The second relevant primary institution is that of Community constitutionalism. I argued in the preceding chapter that, within the EC, the understanding of Community law as a genuine supranational legal order emerged as a primary institution from the 1960s onwards but was still challenged by certain national high courts in the late 1980s. Externally, however, the acknowledgement of EC law supremacy and direct effect were central conditions for accession from the very first round of enlargement. For example, the Commission (1972; see also Hoffmeister 2002:
98; Ott 2002: 15) stressed in its opinion on the applications of Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the UK that
it is an essential feature of the legal system set up by the Treaties establishing the Communities that certain of their provisions and certain acts of the Community institutions are directly applicable, that Community law takes precedence over any national provisions conflicting with it, and […] accession to the Communities entails recognition of the binding force of these rules, observance of which is indispensable to guarantee the effectiveness and unity of Community law.
The later Commission opinions on Greece, Portugal and Spain reaffirmed this view, thereby defining the acknowledgement of Community constitutionalism a constitutive characteristic of any potential new member state.
Although the term was yet to be established as a common EC colloquialism, the idea of an acquis communautaire to be accepted by aspiring members also figured prominently as a membership condition in these early documents on EC enlargement.80 It was first introduced by the heads of state and government at the The Hague Summit in 1969, where they argued that applicant states needed to “accept the Treaties and their political finality, the decisions taken since the entry into force of the Treaties and the options made in the sphere of development” (The Hague Summit 1969; see also Hillion
80 On the acquis communautaire as an internal primary institution of the European international society, see Diez, Manners and Whitman (2011).