Conflict, Negotiation and European Union Enlargement

This book argues on EU enlargement looks at how EU members and applicant states negotiate enlargement benefits and costs.

Christina J. Schneider (Author)

9781107404427, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 May 2012

228 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.31 kg

“Christina Schneider has written a remarkably wide-ranging and analytically deep and compelling analysis of EU enlargement. Carefully dissecting the many and complex distributional battles involved in successive enlargement rounds and pondering their implications, her work stands out as one of the best studies on a central aspect of European integration – methodologically sophisticated, thorough, and original.”
Walter Mattli, Professor of International Political Economy, Oxford University

Each wave of expansion of the European Union has led to political tensions and conflict. Existing members fear their membership privileges will diminish and candidates are loath to concede the expected benefits of membership. Despite these conflicts, enlargement has always succeeded - so why does the EU continue to admit new states even though current members might lose from their accession? Combining political economy logic with statistical and case study analyses, Christina J. Schneider argues that the dominant theories of EU enlargement ignore how EU members and applicant states negotiate the distribution of enlargement benefits and costs. She explains that EU enlargement happens despite distributional conflicts if the overall gains of enlargement are redistributed from the relative winners among existing members and applicants to the relative losers. If the overall gains from enlargement are sufficiently great, a redistribution of these gains will compensate losers, making enlargement attractive for all states.

List of illustrations
List of tables
List of acronyms
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. EU enlargements and transitional periods
3. A rationalist puzzle of EU enlargement?
4. A theory of discriminatory membership
5. EU enlargement, distributional conflicts, and the demand for compensation
6. The discriminatory of membership
7. Discriminatory membership and intra-union redistribution
8. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], EU & European institutions [JPSN2], Politics & government [JP]