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Since its establishment in 1957, the European Union has constantly expanded its borders and welcomed new members.
Graph: EU-Enlargement history (to enlarge click on the graph)
The last expansion of the EU took place on 1st of January 2007. Bulgaria and Romania became EU members.
Other candidates who hope for EU membership after 2007 are Albania, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Macedonia and Turkey.
| EU Expansion 2004: Beginning of the Reunification of Europe |
The expansion of the European Union in May 2004 was not only an important event due to the number of acceding countries, but also due to the fact that eight of the ten new EU members were states of the former Eastern Bloc. With their entry to the EU, the decades-long division of Europe was finally put to an end.
Thanks to the enlargement, the EU population grew by 19,6% to 454,9 million citizens, whereby from a total of 74,1 million new EU citizens, every second one lives in Poland.
The preparations: Along with the Wall, the Iron Curtain also fell
Four years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, State and Government leaders of the European Union agreed in June 1993 at summit talks in Copenhagen that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe could become members of the European Union if they so wished. This paved the way for the largest EU enlargement up to now. Even back then, the criteria for the enlargement were agreed upon. The so-called Copenhagen Criteria were to become a benchmark for the new member states.
These included:
- the stability of the institutions, democracy, Constitutional State,
- the protection of human rights as well as respect and protection of minority groups,
- an efficient market economy,
- the acceptance of the joint rules, standards and policies, which portray the collectivity of EU law.
Each candidate country makes varying levels of progress
In the following years the first countries began to prepare themselves for the accession. The European Commission, the Council and the Parliament regularly reviewed the preparations’ progress. In 1998 the Commission officially opened negotiations with six candidates:
Estonia, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Cyprus were the countries that had made the most progress. Two years later negotiations were initiated with Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. The candidates had to process a thick catalogue of subjects, which summarised all areas of the European cooperation in 31 chapters.
At the end of 2002 the European Commission announced that the negotiations on EU entry for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Cyprus were closed. According to the Commission these countries had completed all tasks in order to enter the EU and were ready to become members of the European Union at the beginning of 2004.
In April 2003 the ten new EU members signed the accession treaty in a festive ceremony in Athens. After the accession agreement had been ratified by all, the new member states officially entered the European Union on 1st May 2004.
The new states have a short but very difficult path behind them: In the fifteen years since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the former "Eastern Bloc" with a planned economy has developed fully-fledged EU members with free market economies and dynamic growth stock.
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