Economic Success
It is undeniable that the EC/EU has been a resounding economic success. Whether or not this success can be attributed directly to the Customs Union and the Cohesion policies, or more generally to the simple fact of the ‘stability’ it has brought to Europe after WW2 is however not really the issue, as undoubtedly both played their part. Nevertheless, the economic success factor continues to act as a powerful magnet, ensuring that those on the periphery of the Union are eventually ‘pulled into its orbit’. Below the rarefied level of ‘high politics’ however it is undoubtedly the case that it was the reduction and elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade (i.e. the envisaged creation of a ‘single market’) that originally, in practice, drove the integration process. This of course had a significant number of ‘knock-on’ spatial effects within the context of enlargement, though the basic motor of ‘trade diffusion’ has now been replaced by broader ‘regime change’ factors in the new Member States. The pace of this process is of course quickened when the attractiveness of the integration project – or the expected benefits of membership – precipitate indigenous ‘push’ dynamics from within the group of countries currently outside the Union. This was perhaps most evident with the Mediterranean enlargements of the 1980s, though the realities of the ‘classical method’ of enlargement generally ensured that current members’ interests were protected at the expense of those of prospective entrants. As such, entry on the basis of short-term economic gain has rarely been an important driver of enlargement as the costs of ‘adjustment’ usually outweigh initial trade based gains. This is particularly evident in terms of the expected ‘cost’ in GDP terms to the new CEE Member States of implementing the EUs high environmental standards. Note should however also be made of the fact that the power of this particular driving force – in relation to some of the other driving forces – has to some extent been seen to have declined in recent years for a number of reasons, with the nature of globalisation in particular playing an important role here. As such, where previously the focus of economic integration was ‘regional’ it is now increasingly global. This significantly impacts on European integration to the extent that the EU itself is no longer viewed as the primary economic generator of integration, but rather as its regionally based political guarantor. Thus the EUs role in this sense is subtly changing. Moreover, as the major economic ‘players’ in Europe are almost all now already members, the power of the economic driving force to continue (in a political sense at least) to ‘push the borders of the EU outwards’ has waned with the decline in the number of economically attractive prospective applicants, while additionally, full EU membership itself is no longer seen as a necessary prerequisite to participation in either regional or global economic integration, though it continues to afford prospective members with the most effective route to politicoinstitutional ‘lock-in’.