According to the dominant incentive-based explanation, European Union (EU) conditionality has been particularly effective when the EU offered a credible membership incentive and when incumbent governments did not consider the domestic costs of compliance threatening to their hold on power. However, after the EU's eastern enlargement the influence of international institutions could then be expected to decrease in three different contexts: (i) the new member states after accession; (ii) the current candidate countries; and (iii) the postcommunist countries in the European neighbourhood policy. Yet although the incentive-based explanation receives support in some issue areas, in others, external influence is more enduring than predicted. To the extent that our understanding of the power of incentives is complicated by post-enlargement findings, there are new avenues for research into the full range of mechanisms that international institutions have at their disposal for influencing target states.

This introduction summarizes the findings of nine research articles that examine the consequences of the European Union's eastern enlargement ten years on. The volume reaches three surprising conclusions: since 2004, the EU's economic effects have been more far‐reaching than its political effects; all of the new Member States (NMS) have had problems with democratic consolidation; and, despite four years of intense crisis in the eurozone, both the EU's enlargement and neighbourhood‐shaping efforts have continued. We set these economic, political and institutional developments in the context of the long‐standing east–west divide in Europe, and ask whether EU membership for post‐communist countries upends the continent's traditionally persistent divisions. Notable achievements of EU enlargement notwithstanding, the volume points to the continuing important differences between east and west and highlights the issue areas in which the EU transcends but also reinforces the centuries‐old partition.

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Long before the cold war and the Iron Curtain's construction, the European continent was marked by a developmental divide in which the east suffered relative economic deprivation compared to the west. This article revisits the sources of ‘economic backwardness’ in eastern Europe and asks whether post‐communist states' membership in the European Union (EU) upends the earlier structural conditions that had traditionally prevented east–west economic convergence. The article finds that while there is more economic opportunity for post‐communist states in the EU than outside it, EU membership does not subvert the major drivers of the developmental divide. EU membership does, however, limit economic volatility for the New Member States (NMS), which, in historical perspective, is a boon for eastern populations and stabilizing for democratic politics.

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