(134) How Does the EU Enlarge? At a summit meeting of the European Council in Copenhagen in 1993 the EU established a blueprint for how future accessions should be managed. The so-called Copenhagen criteria concentrated especially on a country’s democratic institutions that ought to guarantee key liberal democratic principles promoted by the EU. Every new member state also has to make the necessary economic adjustments in order to cope with the competitive pressures of the Single Market. A new administrative criterion was developed to ensure the presence of institutional capacities that guaranteed the continual implementation of EU law. This criterion focuses on the candidate’s public administration, testing whether the bureaucracy, from ministries to law enforcement agencies and to courts, would be able to fulfill their functions against an ever increasing stream of legislation issuing from Brussels. In light of the Maastricht Treaty and its widespread reforms (which had entered into force a few months earlier), the Copenhagen criteria also required that the capacity to absorb new member states should not jeopardize the momentum of European integration.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 03:58:19 +0000
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