EU Enlargement: 10 New Members
Ten countries joined the European Union on 1 May 2004 — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Malta — the largest enlargement in its history, adding about 75 million people and increasing membership from fifteen to twenty-five. Eight of the ten had been under Communist rule fifteen years earlier, and three had been republics of the Soviet Union. The accession process was long and one-sided. Candidates had to adopt the entire body of EU law, the acquis communautaire, running to some 80,000 pages, and to satisfy the Copenhagen criteria of 1993: stable democratic institutions, the rule of law, human rights and minority protection, a functioning market economy, and the administrative capacity to implement membership. It was, in effect, the most successful instrument of institutional reform the Union has ever possessed, because it worked on states that wanted in. Existing members restricted the movement of workers from the new states for up to seven years. Britain, Ireland and Sweden did not, and the resulting migration — far larger than forecast, particularly from Poland to Britain — became a durable feature of politics in the receiving countries and a significant factor in the Brexit referendum. Cyprus joined divided, after Greek Cypriots rejected the UN reunification plan weeks earlier. Bulgaria and Romania followed in 2007, Croatia in 2013. The convergence in income has been substantial. The convergence in democratic standards has not held everywhere, and both Hungary and Poland have since been subject to rule-of-law proceedings. Enlargement fatigue set in afterwards and the process stalled for a decade in the Western Balkans. Russia's invasion of Ukraine revived it, and Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia were given candidate status.
- Year: 2004 CE
- Category: Political
