The Economy of Catalonia

the Copenhagen criteria, which establish the terms for EU enlargements, a
Catalan State which, having become independent, has institutionally left
the EU, and which seeks to be readmitted as a member, would have to
submit its candidature for accession, complying with the terms established
in Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union, as well as those of Article
6 (called the Copenhagen Criteria for having been approved by European
Council in the Danish capital in June 1993).
Catalonia meets all these requirements, namely:
a) The existence of institutions that guarantee democracy, the rule
of law and respect for human rights and minorities.
b) The existence of a viable market economy able to cope with the
competition and with the market forces within the EU.
c) The capacity to assume the obligations arising from the accession,
with respect to the European rules (the Acquis Communautaire or
Community Acquis), as well as the goals of Political Union.
d) The Madrid European Council of June 1995 added to these conditions
the ability to become fully integrated in the EU’s system
of governance.
Accordingly, within this framework, the problem for Catalonia would
not be to comply with these admission criteria, since it already does so as
a Spanish European region integrated in the EU’s standards and rules,
but rather to succeed in being accepted for the start of negotiations on
accession as a member, in order to join the European institutions with
the weight that may be agreed on. This would require that the Council,
by unanimity of all the present EU member States, without exception,
should approve Catalonia’s request for accession and that it should instruct
the European Commission to start performing the pertinent technical
analyses, to draft an opinion analysing whether the candidate complies
with the admissibility criteria and whether any serious structural
problems exist, and to report to the Council on the weight that the new
member State should have within the institutions of the enlarged EU.
On reaching this point, a screening is carried out on the degree of the
candidate State’s compliance with the European rules and on its administrative
capacity to adapt itself to the EU Acquis, which is divided into
thirty chapters for the purpose of analysis. These chapters come to be
62 The Economy of Catalonia