Prof. Dr Wolfgang Schumann's Bookmarks

Each wave of expansion of the European Union has led to political tensions and conflict. Existing members fear their membership privileges will diminish and candidates are loath to concede the expected benefits of membership. Despite these conflicts, enlargement has always succeeded - so why does the EU continue to admit new states even though current members might lose from their accession? Combining political economy logic with statistical and case study analyses, Christina J. Schneider argues that the dominant theories of EU enlargement ignore how EU members and applicant states negotiate the distribution of enlargement benefits and costs. She explains that EU enlargement happens despite distributional conflicts if the overall gains of enlargement are redistributed from the relative winners among existing members and applicants to the relative losers. If the overall gains from enlargement are sufficiently great, a redistribution of these gains will compensate losers, making enlargement attractive for all states.

• Offers an in-depth overview of existing literature on EU integration and enlargement
• Features past enlargements, the formal enlargement process, and other information relevant for EU enlargement
• Includes a combination of different methods: game-theory, quantitative analysis and case studies

Contents

1. Introduction; 2. EU enlargements and transitional periods; 3. A rationalist puzzle of EU enlargement?; 4. A theory of discriminatory membership; 5. EU enlargement, distributional conflicts, and the demand for compensation; 6. The discriminatory of membership; 7. Discriminatory membership and intra-union redistribution; 8. Conclusion.

The Czech social democrat party is discussing the possibility of suspending president Vaclav Klaus' powers if he does not sign the EU's Lisbon treaty.

The temporary suspension would require a simple majority of 41 votes in the country's 81-seat senate and would allow caretaker prime minister Jan Fischer to sign the document instead.

The president's powers could be suspended on grounds that he is unable to discharge his official functions because he is trying to act above the law.

"There is nothing in the constitution that gives the president the right to veto decisions of the country's highest institutions. Otherwise we could be considered as some kind of absolutist monarchy," former Constitutional Court judge Vojtech Cepl told newspaper Mlada fronta Dnes on Thursday (25 June).

A new European Parliament group that is pro-free market and anti-EU integration unveiled its membership list on Monday (22 June), bringing together 55 MEPs from eight EU states.

Calling itself the "European Conservatives and Reformists Group," the new faction lists "free enterprise," the "sovereign integrity of the nation state" and "probity in the EU institutions" among its principles.

The British Conservative party dominates membership with 26 MEPs, followed by Poland's Law and Justice with 15 deputies and the Czech Republic's ODS party with nine members.

The other five MEPs come from the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Hungary and Latvia.

The group's three main parties are united in their opposition to the Lisbon treaty, which augurs further EU integration. But there is plenty of potential for internal squabbles.

The Polish and Latvian parties have protectionist wings that do not welcome Tory and ODS-style free trade.

The British Conservatives also have a prominent pro-green and civil liberties agenda. Meanwhile, ODS founder Vaclav Klaus denies that human action impacts climate change. And Mr Kaczynski has Roman Catholic views on gay rights.

"I'd be surprised if they survive two years," one EU parliament official said. "A lot depends on the British Conservatives and how embarassed they might be by the antics of the eastern European members."

"The Council [EU member states] expressed concern at the unconstructive political atmosphere and the recent actions challenging the Dayton Peace Agreement. The Council called upon all the political leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina to refrain from nationalist rhetoric, and genuinely focus on bringing forward the necessary reform agenda in the general interest of the country and its citizens," EU foreign ministers gathered in Luxembourg said on 15 June.

The ministers also re-affirmed the EU's commitment to a stronger role in Bosnia and said the transition from the Office of the High Representative to a re-inforced EU presence "could be within reach in the months ahead."

Not likely to help the Swedes however, is the significant institutional change that is expected under their watch, with a new European Parliament due to sit for the first time next month and the current commission scheduled to end this October.

Adding to this confusion is the current drawn-out changeover between the Nice and Lisbon Treaties, with four countries – Ireland, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic - yet to ratify the EU's new set of rules.

The European Commission said it regretted that Croatia and Slovenia had failed to make progress in talks on the settlement of their border row, underlining that it was a bilateral issue. 

The talks had progressed well since January and there remained only a limited number of points to be settled, but the two sides yesterday failed to make progress on those points, says a brief statement issued by Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn’s office. Rehn will now report to the current Czech and future Swedish EU Presidencies, it adds. 

Czech President Vaclav Klaus has said the Czech parliament should ratify any fresh legal clauses attached to the Lisbon treaty to help Ireland clinch a Yes vote in its second referendum.

EU leaders meeting in Brussels on 18-19 June are set to agree on legal guarantees for Ireland in the areas of taxation, neutrality and social affairs.

The extra bells and whistles are designed to help Ireland hold a second referendum on the text in autumn, after an initial No vote last summer. But it is not yet clear how the guarantees will be enshrined in EU law.

The eurosceptic Czech president – a staunch opponent of the treaty – has said that the guarantees would constitute a mini-treaty in themselves. Under Czech law, any fresh international treaty must be ratified by parliament and signed by the president.

"Any conclusion in another form would contradict Article 49 of the [Czech] constitution and I could not accept such a proceeding," Mr Klaus wrote to Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer in a letter released on Wednesday (17 June).

Mr Fischer rejected the request, saying a government agreement would be enough.

"[The guarantees] are not an international treaty of a political nature ...but an international treaty of a governmental type which does not require the powers of the head of state to be concluded," he wrote on the government website.

Most of these countries have worked with remarkable speed and determination. They have had a reason to meet close to 50 conditions set out in "visa roadmaps" issued by the European Commission last year. The ultimate reward, attractive to both citizens and leaders of these countries, is visa-free travel to the Schengen area.

The commission assessments last month noted that Macedonia has met the roadmap criteria; Montenegro and Serbia have met the majority of the conditions; and Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina, meanwhile, will need to do more. Now the ball is in the EU's court. People across the region ask: will the EU really reward the progress made and lift the visa requirements?

Background:

However, this may not be the end of the region's problems, as similar obstacles are expected to emerge in the Western Balkan accession process as a whole, diplomats told EurActiv. 

EU diplomats said the lack of a clearly defined border between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina could soon create problems "one hundred times worse" than the current dispute between Ljubljana and Zagreb, in which the European Commission has invested a huge mediation effort. 

Negotiations on Ireland's guarantees on the EU Lisbon Treaty are going down to the wire with still no text on the table exactly a week before EU leaders are supposed to sign up to them.

EU ambassadors were meant to gather Thursday (11 June) to have a special meeting on the matter but agreeing wording that does not make any other member state jittery but keeps Ireland's electorate happy is proving more difficult than first thought.

Ireland is looking for special guarantees on ethical issues, tax sovereignty and its neutral status. It wants them signed off by EU leaders at their summit next week and a commitment made to make them binding as quickly as possible.

The idea was to tack them on to the next available treaty - possibly Croatia's accession treaty - so that they could be ratified by national parliaments across the bloc.

However, member states fear this could open the door to a further delay in the getting the text ratified, particularly if anything in the text catches the idea of eurosceptic Czech President Vaclav Klaus.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said his party's victory in Sunday's European elections showed that French people wanted the EU to change and has said he would come up with initiatives in that respect "in the days to come."

In a communique published Monday (8 June) on the French president's website, Mr Sarkozy said that his centre-right UMP party's victory showed French people's "recognition for the work accomplished during the French presidency of the European Union [in the second half of last year] and their support for the efforts undertaken by the government to bring to an end an unprecedented global crisis".

Ireland is busy working on legal wording to make the Lisbon Treaty more palatable to Irish voters, but its EU partners have raised concerns about the scope of the texts and some impatience at the pace of the work.

Last week, officials from Dublin met representatives from the 26 other member states to shed some light on what kind of wording Ireland is looking for in order to ensure the greatest chance that its citizens will vote "Yes" the second referendum on the treaty, scheduled for autumn.

But the reason for the wariness among other capitals is that these texts will take the form of legally-binding protocols, which will be attached to the first legal vehicle available to get them ratified. At the moment, the talk is of Croatia's accession treaty, which will have to pass through all 27 parliaments of the EU.

"We want to make sure it is very specific to Ireland, so we do not get asked why we haven't got guarantees on certain issues," said one diplomat.

But the French president, who is an outspoken opponent of Turkey's entry to the European Union, did not want to highlight the strong divergence of views on this topic with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, Le Monde reported on Thursday (28 May).

Sweden favours further EU enlargement, including to Turkey. On Monday this week, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt told Le Figaro newspaper that the EU had "a strategic interest" in Turkey's EU integration and warned against "closing the door" to Ankara.