Future Enlargement of The European Union

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.