ABSTRACT
Eastern enlargement of the European Union will create a new, southeastern, periphery of the Union, a periphery which is partly situated close to the economic core. It has been shown that distance from the core, be it Brussels or Dusseldorf, is a factor strongly influencing economic convergence as it happened in Western Europe after World War II. I Under normal conditions, countries like Czechoslovakia, Slovenia and, of course, Eastern Germany should be on a productivity level comparable to Western Germany, Austria and Italy, with countries like Poland and Hungary on a level perhaps comparable to Spain. Such was the situation immediately before and after the war.2 However, conditions in Eastern Europe were not normal - the region came under the hegemony of the Soviet Union and it was forced to adopt the Soviet political and economic system. So it did not take part in the impetuous convergence process that has characterised the economic development of Western Europe for the last 40 years. The present productivity level is at best 50 per cent of what it could have been. Eastern Europe moved away from Europe and Eastern Central Europe from the core of it. Peripherisation is the result of 40 years of communism.
