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 must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.”
—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)
“... 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)
“To the cry of “follow Mormons and prairie dogs and find good land,” Civil War veterans flocked into Nebraska, joining a vast stampede of unemployed workers, tenant farmers, and European immigrants.”
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvellous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can’t decipher the cyrillic alphabet.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)