ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in this book. The enlargement brakemen were lured into a rhetorical trap and eventually had to consent to the CEEC accession. As Schimmelfennig assumes and this study has systematically confirmed, the more technical issues under negotiation are much more prone to the pursuit of particularistic interests. The Maastricht deal was primarily a political agreement with economic aspects being virtually absent in the communication between Berlin and Paris. In contrast, decisions which were more comprehensible and thus easier to scrutinise by the public strictly followed the imperative of the inclusive norm. The theoretical framework of diffuse decision contexts has been proposed to systematically integrate these insights into the theory of rhetorical action. The existence of this anomie explains both the hesitant association phase in the early 1990s and the difference to the Mediterranean enlargements.
