The Evolution of EU Enlargement Conditionality: Overview and Key Findings

The chapter draws together the key findings of the project, relates them to the two research themes of book and answers the main research questions: How has EU enlargement conditionality changed across different stages of the accession process and between different groups of enlargement applicants? Why has EU enlargement conditionality changed over time? The analysis, which emphasises the strong comparative dimension of the study, unfolds in three steps. Firstly, on a basis of the stages-tructured conditionality model , it discusses the evolution of EU enlargement conditionality across the stages of the accession process between the three groups of enlargement applicants. The first group includes the countries with which the EU completed the first phase of the fifth enlargement in 2004 — the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Cyprus and Malta. The second group consists of Bulgaria and Romania, whose accession to the Union in 2007 led to the completion of the fifth enlargement round. The third group focuses on Croatia’s accession and the ongoing enlargement process with Turkey, Montenegro, Serbia and FYROM, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.