The European Union (EU) is one of themost successful examples in recent times of the peacefulregional expansion of prosperity and stability throughinstitutional structures and shared resources. The EU hassupported a process of governance and economic developmentacross the European continent which now encompasses 27member countries and over 500 million people. EU accessionis a process of alignment through which acceptance of theacquis communautaire (the body of EU law) in aspiring statesleads to the reorganization of an entire corpus ofpolitical, social, economic and cultural relationships, withthe Commission and the Council explicitly negotiating,agreeing upon, refereeing and monitoring these linkages.These technical and political changes- largely generatedthrough accession conditionality are accompanied by aprocess of 'Europeanization' by which all EUcountries come to adopt European norms and values,transferred through many different routes includingdeclaratory policies and documents, small-scale projects,and socialization between governments. In combination, thetransformation that the concept and process of Europe hasbrought about is extraordinary- indeed in many ways it canbe argued that the EU accession process has overcome the aidcomplex and its inefficient parallel systems and short-termprojectized approaches which can often prevent exactly thesesuccessful outcomes in developing countries today. That isnot to suggest, however, that the project of Europeanenlargement is a single monolith, or has been equallysuccessful in all EU accession countries. In certaincontexts it has generated real and important reforms, whilein others, positive institutional change has been far lessclear. Moreover, problems with the process remain, andmoving forward the EU will itself need to adapt to newrealities and changing dynamics in order to ensure thatfuture enlargement is as successful as past accession.
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