EU Accession : Norms and Incentives
The European Union (EU) is one of the most successful examples in recent times of the peaceful regional expansion of prosperity and stability through institutional structures and shared resources. The EU has supported a process of governance and ec...
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/497421468251106943/EU-accession-norms-and-incentives http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27327 |
| Summary: | The European Union (EU) is one of the
most successful examples in recent times of the peaceful
regional expansion of prosperity and stability through
institutional structures and shared resources. The EU has
supported a process of governance and economic development
across the European continent which now encompasses 27
member countries and over 500 million people. EU accession
is a process of alignment through which acceptance of the
acquis communautaire (the body of EU law) in aspiring states
leads to the reorganization of an entire corpus of
political, social, economic and cultural relationships, with
the Commission and the Council explicitly negotiating,
agreeing upon, refereeing and monitoring these linkages.
These technical and political changes- largely generated
through accession conditionality are accompanied by a
process of 'Europeanization' by which all EU
countries come to adopt European norms and values,
transferred through many different routes including
declaratory policies and documents, small-scale projects,
and socialization between governments. In combination, the
transformation that the concept and process of Europe has
brought about is extraordinary- indeed in many ways it can
be argued that the EU accession process has overcome the aid
complex and its inefficient parallel systems and short-term
projectized approaches which can often prevent exactly these
successful outcomes in developing countries today. That is
not to suggest, however, that the project of European
enlargement is a single monolith, or has been equally
successful in all EU accession countries. In certain
contexts it has generated real and important reforms, while
in others, positive institutional change has been far less
clear. Moreover, problems with the process remain, and
moving forward the EU will itself need to adapt to new
realities and changing dynamics in order to ensure that
future enlargement is as successful as past accession. |
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