ABSTRACT
In this article, I analyse the decision of the European Union (EU) to expand to Central and Eastern Europe.2 More precisely, I ask why the EU opened the accession process with the ten associated Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) in March 1998 and started concrete accession negotiations with (only) five of them (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia).3 The analysis is embedded in the current ‘great debate’ between rationalist and sociological or constructivist approaches to the study of international institutions in the international relations discipline (see, e.g., Katzenstein et al. 1999).
