ABSTRACT
The EU’s approach to central and eastern Europe since 1990 may be broadly summarised as: assisting in the painful transfer from a planned to a market economy by means of advice, loans and grants; helping in the establishment of more rigorous and robust administrative and regulatory structures; and insistence on the importance of human rights, particularly with regard to ethnic minorities, and of an independent judiciary unsullied by corruption. The existing member states agreed virtually immediately that they had a moral duty to accept the former Communist states as members in due course, and the basis for the future negotiations was formally adopted at the Copenhagen summit of EU heads of state and government in 1993.
