ABSTRACT
Enlargement is not a one-sided story. An accession contract always requires both parties’ agreement and cannot be accomplished without the third state’s prior request for membership. ‘Enlargement’ is close to a ‘wedding’; it is not possible without both sides’ coinciding professed intentions. Part II (Chapters 4 to 6) thus analyses the reasoning behind both applications for membership. As the general theoretical background has, however, already been discussed extensively in Chapter 1, it is sufficient to repeat briefly the theoretical premises presented above and derive the main hypotheses from the familiar rationalist and socialconstructivist lenses. Moreover, due to the absence of dynamic events – neither the third states nor the EU have withdrawn or shelved the application (see, for example, the double applicaton of Malta in 1990 and 1998) – there is no need to carry out a complex longitudinal process tracing analysis similar to the first part. As the submission of the application is the only event to be examined, the analysis of the demand side is rather static and comparatively short.
