Abstract
As a result of the 2004 ‘big bang’ enlargement and its subsequent 2007 expansion, the European Union (EU) has undergone a dramatic transformation in both its internal composition and the geopolitical make-up of its new peripheries.2 Recognised as the EU’s most successful foreign policy, enlargement has established the young Union as a regional actor of considerable political, economic and normative power, capable of having generated a wave of institutional reforms across eastern and central Europe. However enlargement has also raised the stakes of geopolitical stability significantly; first by unveiling a swathe of new countries on its eastern borders, prompting the question of how the EU should best manage its relationship these new neighbours.3 Some nations in these new frontiers may well yet be included in the Union fold; others appear destined to remain on the outside. Secondly, enlargement has also resurrected the issue of Europe’s ‘old neighbours’, who inhabit the Mediterranean and whose engagement with Europe has been sporadic and awkward. Neighbours old and new represent a challenge to the internal composition of the EU and its extended frontiers, thrusting onto the agenda the uneasy issue of the qualitative goals of the Union as a regional actor and the apparently quantitative issue of its absorption capacity. This constitutes a third, more existential challenge, that of the ultimate identity of the EU, present and future.