The challenge of EU enlargement - East and West

It is a measure of the poverty of most current debate on the issue of Eastern enlargement that it has tended to focus on technical issues, albeit very important ones, rather than the world-historical importance of a process which, viewed in larger terms, signals the beginning of the end of the division of Europe: a division marked by the Iron Curtain but continued in many ways after its demolition.

The new ‘accession countries’ are not just another Beitrittsgebiet (territory) which can be bolted onto the existing enterprise and subjected to the whip or knout of the ‘acquis communautaire’: I share Bobinski’s suspicion of this sinister locution and the processes to which it refers. Although the EU has previously welcomed countries which had suffered authoritarian regimes in the post-war period (Greece, Spain, Portugal and the former GDR), the impending accession of three of the leading members of the former Soviet bloc plus one ex-Soviet and one ex-Yugoslav state is an event of the greatest symbolic as well as practical importance.

There has been some talk in East Central Europe to the effect that the concepts of post-communism or transition are no longer relevant, more than twelve years on, but this is surely to underestimate the nature of the social and political transformation which has occurred and is occurring in even the most ‘western’ parts of the former ‘East’. And eastern enlargement of the EU is of course the beginning of an open-ended process whose end no one can foresee.

Bobinski’s irritation at the failure of most of us in the former ‘West’ to come to terms, politically and intellectually, with these challenges is more than justified.