Author: Cristina Blanco Sío-LópezPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The EU's 2004 'big bang' enlargement increased the diversity and complexity of its membership, bringing in states from Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe. Many key actors have increasingly viewed enlargement as an integral part of EU development and as the most successful foreign policy tool for promoting EU stability. Yet, a growing sense of enlargement fatigue resulting from the policy's structural overload and the EU's financial crisis has strained the prospect of future accession for new member states and brought about the perennial dilemma of widening versus deepening. This perception of stalemate and lack of grand strategy stems from the fact that enlargement policy initially served as a very precise response to the inner challenges of the geopolitical paradigm of the Cold War. In this respect, the study of the Spanish accession to the EC/EU, which took place during a challenging period for Southern Europe in which the dictatorships of Greece, Portugal and Spain simultaneously fell, can help clarify the evolving Cold War and European integration environment and factors of the 1970s. Spain's road to EEC membership, which gained momentum in 1977 and reached a successful conclusion in 1986, can shed light on the EU's 2004 negotiations with the Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEECs). Indeed, Spain's EC accession strongly resonates with the CEECs' cases not only in terms of shared characteristics (for example, the democratisation process and adjustment of economic relations), but also in terms of the complexity and the consequences that these accessions posed to the EU. Both cases also share a collective perception of recovering a 'natural Europeanness' via a 'rectifying revolution' and a sense of returning to a supposedly original and forcibly-denied starting point. This historical perspective, which covers enlargement in the Cold War and in the post-Cold War era, can help reveal the evolution of the mechanisms of enlargement and its impact on European integration.
