Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

The ‘enlargement fatigue’ observed in European public opinion
gives poor counsel for thinking in terms of the future. A pause in the
enlargement process has already imposed itself through force of
circumstance, but a political philosophy should not be made of it.
With the exception of Croatia, no other country will have the opportunity
to join the EU in the near future. Next will be Macedonia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Kosovo, and perhaps also
Albania; there is little chance of this happening before 2020. Only
then would the issue arise of the membership of Turkey, which
opened accession negotiations in 2005, and also of the Eastern
European countries that have applied to join. It seems utterly pointless
to speculate at this time whether these expectations will meet
with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, because we do not know what the European
Union will be like in 2025, and we do not know what the intentions
of these candidate countries will be at that time either. On the other
hand, we need to realise that the negotiations have a pacifying effect
on the regions concerned, and also that they encourage and
support the modernisation process within them. Setting out to fix
‘Europe’s borders’ can only feed populist distortions, since these
borders are already defined by encounters between geography and
history. Meanwhile, the European Union can move its borders by
virtue of the principle enshrined in the Treaty of Rome whereby ‘any
European state’ has the right to apply for membership, while the
EU’s decision depends on the application of the Copenhagen
criteria, the positive outcome of negotiations and its own absorption
capacity.
There is no need to return to the projects formulated in the aftermath
of the Berlin Wall coming down, motivated by the fear of enlargement.
The fear that the ‘new barbarians’ were at the EU’s gates
was what led to this idea of introducing different circles of integration
into the Community, breaking with the principle of equality between
Member States: this idea emerged at the time in German
Christian Democrat circles, and now seems to have been taken up
again by the same circles. This would not serve the interests of the
EU in the least; on the contrary, it would weaken it. The European
Union can only move forward by taking a pragmatic approach
based on a vision of the future. And also based on hopes, not fears.
39 Bronisław Geremek