EU expansion to the east. Prospects and problems

Book abstract:

This work presents a collection of essays which consider in detail the opportunities, challenges and problems arising from the imminent expansion of the EU into the post-communist Central and Eastern European Countries. This enlargement will bring Europe the closest it has yet been to a state of voluntary unification. The book has twelve chapters and following an introductory chapter the next four consider issues of general importance to the future configuration of Europe. These are followed by chapters addressing the evolution of the EU's major funding programmes in the context of looming Eastern expansion and address such issues as agriculture, social policy, regional development, and cross-border co-operation. The reader is then given two country studies; the first is Poland, already on the doorstep of entry and pushing positively at the entrance, and the second is Romania whose governments since the overthrow of Ceausescu have all held the key objective of closer co-operation with and full involvement in the EU. The concluding chapter examines the impact of such enlargement on the tone and character of Western European liberalism which has been championed within the EU and appeared strengthened by the overthrow of the communist regimes in the 1990s and closes with the thought that western liberal democracy might be challenged by the culture change likely to arise from the Eastern expansion. The work will interest students, scholars and policy researchers in European affairs and those interested in transition at national, regional and local levels. Hilary Ingham is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Lancaster University. Mike Ingham is Associate Director of the European Studies Research Institute at the University of Salford.