Main Subject Group of EU Basic Course 5

It is also clear, however, that the enlargement process represents an extraordinarily complicated subject. Not only does it concern the EU and its member states - which as a subject would be enough on its own -, it also concerns fundamental questions with regards to how relationships between the European states should be structured following the end of the Cold War and issues concerning how to ensure internal stability in Central and Eastern European states (CEEC) and much more besides. And it is set against this background that any attempt at providing a comprehensive overview of the subject regardless of how ambitious would be doomed to failure .

And anyway it's important to remember that our objective is not to achieve a complete account and overview of all the aspects at work. No, our objectives here are similar to the ones that we set down for our analysis of the EU. Drawing on an overview of the way in which the enlargement process has developed in the past, our goal is to achieve a basic understanding of the central aspects that will include the driving forces and influencing factors and to provide you with a small Model that will enable you to follow and judge all the processes related to enlargement on your own when the facts given in this part of the Main Subject Group are no longer up-to-date.

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The structure of Basic Course 5

What knowledge, tools and instruments do we need to reach this goal?

Model for analysing the enlargement process

First of all we need a framework for our analysis, a model that will help us understand the complexity of reality in this area and to decide what to pay attention to and to identify the factors that are influencing and determining the enlargement process.

To this end, then, we need to know about the most significant factors and we will be addressing these in three steps.

Phase 1: From the UK's first membership application to the EFTA enlargement

We want to start by taking a brief look at the previous enlargement rounds from 1961 (the UK's first membership application) to 1995 (the so-called EFTA enlargement). This will enable us to summarize the most important stages of this process. Another decisive piece of work that we need to do is to investigate the model's determining factors.

Phase 2: Enlargement to the East

We then want to take a complementary second step and address the enlargement to the East, which took place on the 1st of May 2004 and introduced 10 new states into the EU. Because of the special characteristics, topicality and far-reaching impact of this enlargement stage, however, we will be going into this enlargement phase in much more detail.

Phase 3: Analysing the next enlargement phase with regards to Bulgaria, Rumania, Croatia and Turkey

The current enlargement process forms the core subject of the third step, this means

	the outstanding problems with Bulgaria and Rumania, which still remain to be resolved even after the accession contracts were signed on 24.05.2005;
	The future of negotiations with Croatia, which were deferred for the time being in March 2005 and
	The much more pressing and controversial issue of whether or not and on what condition Turkey should be allowed to join the EU. Indeed, this issue has been intensified even further since the "No" vote in the referendums in France and the Netherlands and the election of a new government in Germany in September 2005. And it is against this background that not only do we want to explain the situation in detail we also want to draw on their example to demonstrate how our graphic can help to shine light on a complicated process such as this and even to make tentative forecasts as to how things might progress.