ABSTRACT
The collapse of communist order in Central and Eastern Europe during the autumn and winter of 1989 found the then European Community (EC) preoccupied with its own internal agenda – namely, the process of negotiating economic and monetary union (EMU) – and with very few instruments at its disposal to shape the immediate aftermath of popular revolutions in the region. The process of devising new policy instruments for the regulation of economic and political relations with the emerging Central and East European (CEE) democracies has been an incremental and often controversial one. During the early stages of transition, the EC (later EU) refused to commit to the principle of eastwards enlargement despite persistent calls from its CEE partners to do so. The prospect of EU membership for these countries was first acknowledged by the Copenhagen European Council in 1993, before an embryonic EU ‘strategy’ for enlargement was put into place during the mid-1990s. This culminated, in 1997, in the ‘Agenda 2000’ document (European Commission, 1997a), a series of detailed policy proposals for preparing the EU for enlargement, published alongside the Commission’s opinions on the membership applications submitted in 1994-1996 by ten CEE countries.1
