Institutional and Practical Dynamics of EU Enlargement Decision Making

Enlargement policy can be considered as maintaining a strong external relations dimension in the sense that the EU negotiates important agreements, such as association agreements and accession treaties, with external partners. According to the TEU the Council, in the form of an intergovernmental conference and acting unanimously, is defined as the formal decision-making body in the field of enlargement. Meanwhile, the Commission and the Parliament seem to be given mainly consultative or secondary roles. However, a more substantive analysis of institutional and practical dynamics of enlargement policy-making would expose a more complicated picture. It is thus aimed, in this paper, first to assess the particular impact of EU’s main institutions, namely the Council (including both the European Council and the Council of the EU), the Commission and the Parliament, as well as that of inter-institutional relations in enlargement decision-making. Secondly, it is aspired to demonstrate the influence of “practical dynamics” (meaning dynamics caused by internal functioning and daily decision-making practices within each institution) on overall enlargement policy-making. For these purposes, a comparative analysis of the fifth enlargement, largely known as the eastern enlargement, and the ongoing process will be accomplished. It is hypothesized that the practical dynamics of enlargement process, together with the growing influence of the Commission and the European Parliament, have created throughout the years a kind of ‘EU Machinery’ which favors the ‘community method’ against ‘intergovernmentalism’ and renders the community method considerably important in an area which is predominantly presumed as greatly intergovernmental in EU studies literature, notably by liberal intergovernmentalists. The analyses in this study are mainly taken from author’s doctoral research project which included 35 in-depth interviews with enlargement policy-makers as well as an exclusive analysis of the existing data in the relevant literature.