HOW MUCH CAN THE EU EXPAND?
Andrei Konurov

en.fondsk.ru
12.12.2008

It is not necessarily true that no news is good news. The same
day foreign ministers of NATO countries made the final decision
to postpone extending the NATO membership plan to Georgia and
Ukraine the European Commission unveiled the Eastern Partnership
Project. Currently the initiative proposed by Poland and Sweden in
March, 2008 is materializing at a fast pace. No doubt, the motivation
for the rush largely stems from the war in South Ossetia, and Europe
is quite open about this aspect of the matter.

The camp of Ukrainian President V. Yushchenko must be happy about
the developments. Some media already feature comments claiming that
the Eastern Partnership will replace the European Neighborhood Policy
allegedly regarded as a failure by the EU and that the new partnership
will be much broader in terms of its proportions and future. The
opinion, though, is likely to reflect the wishful thinking not
uncommon among the media brethren. The European Commission indicated
clearly that the Eastern Partnership is an integral part of the
same old European Neighborhood Policy and any steps to be made in
the framework of the former entirely fit within the confines of the
latter. Essentially, the same things are given new names, but even
this is not the core of the matter.

The thrust of the European Commission’s new document is that for
the post-Soviet Republics – Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Belarus,
Ukraine, and Moldova – the Eastern Partnership is by no means going
to be a stepping stone to the EU membership. At the moment, the EU
has no unfilled vacancies, obviously.

Presenting the plan European Commission President José Manuel
Barroso said unequivocally that at present the EU is not in the
position to promise admission to anybody. Though the document
reads that the Eastern partners got drawn closer to the EU thanks
to a series of its successful expansions, the configuration which
emerged as the result of the expansions is loaded with problems. The
EU grew into a heterogeneous alliance of 27 countries having widely
varying socioeconomic development levels, and in its current shape
it clearly lacks cohesion. New expansions, if any, are going to be
highly selective. No expansions for their own sake will follow in
the foreseeable future. For example, though Turkey and Croatia are
official EU candidates, their cases remain undecided. Brussels does
not quite perceive the Balkan Slavs as absolute Europeans and harbors
strong reservations about Turkey.

–Boundary_(ID_bf+wnbgduT7RD7SXUy0WWg)–