The future enlargement of the European Union is theoretically open to any European country which is democratic, operates a free market and is willing and able to implement all previous European Union law. Past enlargement has brought membership from six to twenty-seven members since the foundation of the European Union (EU) as the European Coal and Steel Community by the Inner Six in 1952. The accession criteria are included in the Copenhagen criteria, agreed in 1993, and the Treaty of Maastricht (Article 49). Whether a country is European or not is a subject to political assessment by the EU institutions.
At present, Croatia is set to accede to the EU in 2013 and there are five recognised candidates for membership: Iceland (applied 2009), Macedonia (applied 2004), Montenegro (applied 2008), Serbia (applied 2009) and Turkey (applied 1987). Serbia and Macedonia have not yet started negotiations to join. The other states in the Western Balkans—Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina—have signed Stabilisation and Association Agreements (SAA) with the EU, which generally precede the lodging of membership applications. Albania applied for membership in April 2009, but the European Commission has yet to respond.
On Central and Eastern European countries not being parts of the EU, Heather Grabbe (UK) of the Centre for European Reform commented: "Belarus is too authoritarian, Moldova too poor, Ukraine too large, and Russia too scary for the EU to contemplate offering membership any time soon." This was confirmed by a Polish-Swedish authored EU strategy which outlined full integration short of membership being offered to states in the East of Europe but no enlargement perspective offered in the short to medium term.
Read more about Future Enlargement Of The European Union: Current Agenda, States Not On The Agenda, Special Territories of Member States, Northern Cyprus, Secessionist Scenarios
Famous quotes containing the words future, enlargement, european and/or union:
“We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“... when I exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination.—For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers ...”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
“England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)