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membership (EU Commission). It’s an in depth analysis of the EU laws with which the candidate country must abide by (known as the ‘aquis’). A screening report is then drawn up for each country (ibid). Negotiations take place at ministerial level between permanent representatives for EU countries, and ambassadors or chief negotiators for candidate countries.

But why do countries want to join the EU in the first place? This question is asked by Clive Lindley of the Central Europe express (Charles Jenkins, 2000). This author quotes an American journalist as writing “What does Europe want to be when it grows up?”

Julie Smith, Head of the European programme at the Royal institute for international affairs, also begins to explore the boundaries at which the expansion of the will be no longer feasible. She states that “How [will] the EU be able to function with thirty or more member states...” (Charles Jenkins, 2000). According to her, it is a “problem that clearly exercised many of Europe’s leading politicians in 2000.

3.0

When the ‘European Coal and Steel Community’ was created in 1957 it was with an aspiration to form a trading block of peace and economic prosperity. For more than half a century, the current European Union has exerted its soft power, attracting almost every country in Europe and completed six successful enlargement rounds (fig 1).

(fig 1 – source:…)

After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Central Eastern European Countries (CEEC’s) started to show interest in applying for EU membership (EU27 on enlargement). As a result of this, the ‘Copenhagen Criteria’ was set out in December 1993 declaring the requirements that any potential country wishing to join the EU, would need to meet. This was the first time the EU had made a clear commitment to enlargement, and provided Europe with evidence of their engagement in becoming a bigger and more influential trading block (Lippert et all 2001). Since then, as shown in the timeline, the EU has expanded substantially, and includes today a total of 27 member states. This leaves only 14 European countries (excluding Russia) as non members, four of which are candidate countries, five potential candidates, two who have been declined membership, two with an ENP Action Plan [1] and one with not many EU relations.

The size of any further EU enlargement is therefore confined by the borders of Europe and the enlargement rationale, is determined by the economic opportunities and the promotion of security in these 12 remaining countries (Nugent 2004).

4.0

In this part of the report we are going to discuss the economic side of the EU enlargement. Firstly we will be taking a more statistical approach in evaluating the economy. We will then take some candidate countries, and discuss what will happen if they join the EU.

Since 1994, when the 10+2 candidate countries was selected they have had significant progress in their economy, they have gained an average growth of 1.3/2.1% GDP per year in between 1994-2004 (European Commission, 2001) but more importantly their GDP would have reduce by 0.1% if they was not chosen as candidate countries( Maliszewska 2003). This showed that the economy was developing quickly, many factors contributed to this including Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), imports and exports.

Intra trading plays an importa