To be a world power house
Introduction
While the economic success driver historically acted as a powerful force ‘pulling’ the States of Europe into the Union, ‘the fear of being left behind’ predominantly acts as a ‘push’ factor on prospective members. Basically, as the EU became increasingly successful, encompassing ever larger swathes of Europe, the costs of non-membership increased exponentially for most countries, but particularly for those rather more fragile non-members who sought not only economic, but also political and civic benefits from entry (i.e. politicoinstitutional ‘lock-in’). Moreover, this is, in itself, a rather dynamic process as the actions of ones immediate neighbours can potentially fundamentally affect ones own decision-making processes. We can therefore postulate that this factor perhaps played a role in respect of the various EFTA countries applications to the EU in the early 1990s, where each country undoubtedly sought to avoid being ‘left behind’ and where it was perceived to be important to get ones feet ‘under the table’ before the onrush of new applicants. Similarly, the Central and East European countries that were eventually to accede en masse in 2004 were each very keen to ensure that they were not ‘slow tracked’ – a fate that was eventually to befall Rumania and Bulgaria – with all the consequences that such a decision would have for their economies when they finally got down to the ‘nitty-gritty’ of the accession negotiations, with their neighbours and often direct competitors (in terms of industrial and agricultural production, the need to ‘export’ labour to gain remittances from the stronger economies of the Union, and in respect of attracting either FDI or ‘cohesion’ financing) now on ‘the inside’ and thus able, in part, to ‘dictate’ the conditions of entry for prospective new members. Thus the practical implementation of the 2004 enlargement framework saw the grouping together of a number of hitherto rather distinct groupings of applicants, namely, the Mediterranean island mini-states, the Baltic States, and the so-called Visegrad States, with Slovenia providing a fourth grouping as it managed to politically detach itself from the rest of the Western Balkan grouping – who were deemed unready for membership given the various continuing ‘ethnic’ conflicts across the region. Similarly, for this very reason, Croatia has been assiduous in attempting to de-couple itself from Serbia in particular, and the rest of the Western Balkans in general as regards future EU accession.