ABSTRACT
In this book we have discussed what kind of understanding of the EU enlargement speaks to. Our starting assumption was that the issue of membership and how it has been dealt with provides a particularly useful intake to understand the nature of a polity such as the EU. This is so because in order for an organization to find criteria for inclusion (as well as exclusion) of members some idea of its fundamental purposes would be required. New applications for membership, the prospect of enlargement, inevitably raise questions such as who the Europeans are and what kind of values characterize Europe.
