No abstract

There is a growing volume of literature on the EU’s enlargement towards the eastern part of the continent which, from the perspective of the SEER Journal, is gaining increasing importance as the EU now seeks, once again, to re-orient itself towards the countries of the western Balkans. Interest in the literature is growing not only because the results have been ambiguous but also because the nature of the process itself remains largely unexplained. This article seeks to reconstruct the concept of eastern enlargement, taking account of the reality of the national interests and compromises that shaped its direction and that of the wider notion of European integration. It draws on the belief that enlargement conditionality has been represented as having inevitable validity, thereby allowing a revision of the understanding of the role, importance and limits of that validity. The author concludes that an accelerated enlargement process has had a knock-on impact on the quality of integration itself; and that the reality of national interests has pre-determined an unfinished character to the process of Europeanisation.

The Bulgarian case is symptomatic of the susceptibility of the EU enlargement policy under geopolitical pressure. The aim of this text is to add arguments to the statement that the dynamic of Bulgaria’s accession to the EU has been strongly influenced by external factors – mainly Yugoslavia’s disintegration and the subsequential Kososvo crisis. This crisis brought up the issue of the huge Russian influence over Bulgarian politics and societies and, as a result, predetermined the perception of Bulgaria as a high security risk for EU. In this situation, Bulgaria was an object of de-securitisation by the EU’s enlargement policy, but at the same time its main instrument, namely, the conditionality policy, was neglected. From this point of view, the Bulgarian case is important because: it illustrates the effects of this discrepancy to date; it is instructive in the context of EU enlargement policy towards the Western Balkans with huge Russian influence; and also in the context of the acceleration of the EU’s eastern enlargement policy toward Ukraine and Moldova because of the pressure of the ongoing Russian military invasion. The opportunity for accelerating the pre-accession process under the infl uence of unpredicted external events created prerequisites for politicising the whole process, including the political use of the conditionality and the consequently unfinished preaccession preparation of the newcomers. The research task is fulfilled by a synthesis of primary and secondary sources organised around three main questions – Which external circumstances? Why? and, How? The results of a discourse analysis of interviews with key participants in Bulgaria’s EU integration process are used as a starting point.