The European Union: Integration and Enlargement

This book explores one of the central challenges facing the EU today – how to reconcile enlargement with the pursuit of a stronger and more effective European Union. While the relationship between widening and deepening has been recognized for years as one of the big questions in the field of European integration, existing theoretical and empirical analyses of this relationship suffer from a variety of shortcomings. This book brings together a group of EU scholars who significantly advance our understanding of the relationship between widening and deepening. The contributors challenge a variety of ‘common wisdoms’ concerning the relationship between widening and deepening and offer nuanced theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between these two vital dimensions of European integration. Collectively, the contributors to this volume offer the most comprehensive picture available to date of the multi-faceted relationship between widening and deepening.

1. The European Union: Wider and Deeper? 2. Wider and Deeper? Enlargement and Integration in the European Union. 3. Enlargement and Differentiated Integration in the European Union, 4. Ever Closer or ever wider? Public attitudes towards further enlargement and integration in the European Union, 5. Domestic Politics and the "Widening-Deepening" trade-off in the European Union, 6. Who Measures Up? Human Rights in an Enlarging European Union. 7. Depth and Width in Regional Economic Organizations, 8. Why Widening Makes Deepening: Unintended Policy Extension through Polity Expansion, 9. Enlargement and the anticipatory deepening of European integration, 10. Necessary deepening? How political groups in the European Parliament adapt to enlargement