ABSTRACT
One of the most important events in the more than fifty-year history of the European Union was the incorporation of eleven Central and Eastern European former communist countries between 2004 and 2013. Some in the Western Balkans, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, are on the waiting list, several already enjoying associate member status. All these countries were in terrible shape when their communist regimes collapsed in 1989 (see Chapter 5). They emerged from one-party dictatorial regimes and state-owned, centrally planned economies. They were frozen in an obsolete economic structure and a hopeless dearth of technology, and they suffered from high, in some cases hyper-, inflation and heavy indebtedness. Their economic standing, based on per capita income, was about a third of the EU-15 countries’ average.
