A new research agenda on the history of the EU: The Eastern enlargement

The eastern enlargement of the EU during the early 2000s was driven by the urgent need to find an effective response to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite persistent challenges to the rule of law in Poland and Hungary, the expansion of the Union has sustained democratic and economic development across the Central and Eastern Europe region. However, deep structural problems related to the enlargement process that were perfectly foreseeable and even intensely debated during the early 2000s were never adequately addressed. This negligence, this chapter holds, has had a negative, yet largely overlooked, impact on the overall functioning of the main institutions of the European Union; as a result, it is now difficult for Member States to agree on the essential next steps towards further European integration identified in other chapters of this book. Possibly nowhere is this problem more evident than in the field of European security.