Globalization and Enlargement: What Future for Eastern Europe? (Uniting Europe: A Dream Too Far)

Globalization and EU enlargement will shape the future of Europe over the next decades. The eastward enlargement of the European Union is not only a political issue or an effort to reunite peoples sharing a common history, culture, and spiritual values. It is also a process through which Europe's firms seek to enhance their competitiveness by taking advantage of market proximity, lower labor costs in Central and Eastern Europe, and the natural resource endowments of the candidate countries. From the perspective of the candidate countries, the enlargement is a vital, even existential, matter because they have relatively small markets and lack capital to overcome quickly the income gap separating them from EU members. While negotiations for accession envisage that the first new members will join the EU in 2003-4, it will take much longer for these countries to reach the economic level of the current EU members. Moreover, the EU has set an ambitious target of achieving simultaneous enlargement and a deepening of integration, which creates the risk of building a Europe of two or three levels of integration.