ABSTRACT
When the European Commission delivered its opinions on the membership applications of the central and east European countries (CEECs) on 16 July 1997, Slovakia clearly emerged as an exceptional case. In the section of “Agenda 2000” devoted to enlargement, it concluded explicitly that Slovakia was the only state not to satisfy the political conditions laid down by the Copenhagen European Council (see Chapter 1, p. 7), and therefore could not be recommended for negotiations on accession to the European Union. Slovakia was thereby consigned to a group of states with which it had very little in common: Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. However, in the case of these four countries, the Commission had stated that they would have serious medium-term economic difficulties in coping with “competitive pressure and market forces within the Union”,1 whereas no such fundamental structural problems were foreseen for Slovakia. Slovakia also diverged from the other four states not recommended for accession negotiations in more general terms. Geographically, it was contiguous with none of them, and it was surrounded in the main by the three states singled out in July 1997 for NATO membership (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland). In terms of wealth, Slovaks were on average nearly twice as prosperous as Bulgarians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Romanians. Slovakia was, in fact, roughly on a par with the five CEECs with whom negotiations were to be commenced (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia): Commission figures showed that per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Slovakia exceeded that of Poland and Estonia, while on the more crucial indicator for living standardspurchasing power per head-only two of the CEECs (Slovenia and the Czech Republic) could better it.2 On the Copenhagen criterion of taking on the
obligations of membership (the acquis), the Commission’s judgements indicated that only the Czech Republic and Hungary were clearly ahead of Slovakia.3
