Enlarging, Fast and Slow: Balancing the EU Commons

Abstract

Speakers: Veronica Anghel, European University Insititute Erik Jones, European University Institute Scholarship looks at European Union (EU) enlargement holistically and assumes a complementarity of its effects. In practice, however, EU membership is not a clean ‘before and after’ process. Membership changes in the EU affect the nature of the goods the organisation administers asynchronously. This temporal misalignment has the potential to disrupt the presumed complementarity between economic, political, and security motivations to enlarge. As a selective membership organisation, the EU manages a system of common resource pools (the EU commons). Some goods that the European Union administers take longer to generate, such as the rule of law or the single financial space. Other goods, such as security, the EU can generate faster. This article shows how the European Union uses the process of enlargement to take control over the management of goods produced at different speeds, such as security and economic stability. In this way, the EU avoids the tragedy of the commons.