| Review of: | Adjusting to EU Enlargement: Recurring Issues in a New Setting edited by C. Stephanou |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Mika Widgrèn |
| Reviewed in: | Journal of Common Market Studies |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 45, Issue 03, Pages 745-769 |
Book Reviews
The 12 chapters of the volume evaluate the impact of the eastern enlargements of 2004 and 2007 from the point of view of the European Union's economic setting, internal governance and cohesion and external relations.
The economics part concentrates, not surprisingly, on the key areas of EU integration, namely trade and investment, competitiveness, location, the CAP and monetary integration. These are exactly the issues on which economics-oriented literature on enlargement concentrate. Generally, this part contains a lot of basic statistical facts but only the chapters on location and monetary integration make an attempt to have a closer look behind the cold numbers. Especially in the trade chapter, the level of analysis could have gone much deeper whereas the EMU chapter contains a thorough discussion of the most relevant aspects of enlargement with respect to monetary union. Part II of the volume deals with governance and cohesion. To put these two into the same part is somewhat artificial, especially as cohesion is closely linked with the CAP via the EU budget and location using typical 'winners and losers' of (deeper) integration arguments. An additional burden of both the CAP and cohesion chapters, especially the latter, is that they are mostly based on summarizing Commission documents. In these chapters, it is impossible to find any links to the wide critical discussion on the future of the EU budget after enlargement. This would have made a linkage to adjustment, which is a part of the title of the volume.
The chapter on political dynamics is a detailed description of the issues involved in enlargement. I would have liked a little deeper discussion about the reactions to the increasing heterogeneity and expanding membership. As an example, the extended role of QMV is a partial solution to avoid paralysis in decision-making but QMV in the EU of 27 members is completely different from QMV in the EU-15 as far as relative majority quotas are concerned. Moreover, when reading the chapter, I at first missed the discussion on enhanced co-operation understood as functional federalism.
The last part covers the external relations of an enlarged EU. Four of the five chapters in this part concentrate on the EU's neighbouring regions either in the east or south. They all provide detailed summaries of the problems and also offer solutions. The final chapter discusses the CEE countries' different approaches to transatlantic relations. In sum, I find that the volume raises many points that are relevant for the future EU after the 2004 and 2007 enlargements and also before the next expansions. In many parts of the volume, however, I would have expected a more analytical approach and overall greater internal homogeneity between the chapters. In edited volumes, though, this is a common problem.