ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the chosen specific modalities for an eventual European Community eastward enlargement had an impact in the generation of democratic deficit. It shows that end of the Cold War represented a missed chance for the consolidation of an East–West integrated and increasingly deepened quality of democracy, especially taking into account the European Commission’s investments and efforts, but also the investments and efforts of the overall institutional structure of the European Union (EU). The chapter addresses ‘EU Communication Strategy on Enlargement’ and the ensuing ‘discursive wall’ that arose between EU citizens and institutions, analyzing such cleavage as a key root cause of the indicated democratic deficit. It highlights notorious semantic charge of EU communication strategies, the power and influence of which was no less significant than hard power identity-building and boundary-making devices. The chapter focuses on processes in which the European Commission configured and selected particularly charged discursive utterances relating to ways of interpreting a radically changing reality.
