THE EUROPEAN UNION’S ENLARGEMENT POLICY CHANGES IN THE LAST DECADE – A SUCCESSFUL INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE OR DYSFUNCTIONAL TRANSFORMATION?

Since 2004, the European Union’s (EU) transformation and integration potential has been evident and limited. An unusual pattern of perceived threats and challenges precluded the EU’s enlargement. One country from the Western Balkans’ (WB) fold was found suitable over the last ten years to join the EU. The rest of the WB are still queuing in front of the gates of the EU family. The purpose of this paper is to assess how recent changes in the international arena, including suffering on Ukraine’s soil and providing candidate status for Ukraine at the same time, affected the EU “red lines” in the enlargement process, together with the lessons learned from the considerable enlargement in 2004. Does the EU enlargement policy as primarily part of the EU foreign policy still have the effect of a “screwdriver,” or has it eventually become a “hammer” of hard power and force by hitting suddenly foreign policy problems that look like nails (Kagan, 2003), as it seems in Ukraine’s example? Did the Lisbon Treaty bring profound transformation to enlargement policy, and is it still one of the EU’s successful stories? This article aims to answer these questions. The assessment method is based on the International practice theory approach and Christian Bueger’s and Frank Gadinger’s definition and determinants of practice known as the Commitments of International Practice Theory (relying on elements of practice defined by Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot). This approach judges whether or not the EU is a global actor that fulfills all inquiries of creating international practice from the enlargement policy. Based on the results, it is confirmed that the EU is a worldwide actor surviving in times of global transformations and that the enlargement policy is a valuable international practice. However, changes in the conditionality policy in the EU accession process could lead to several scenarios, and one of them is the loss of interest in some of the candidate countries, which could cause perceiving the enlargement policy as a dysfunctional transformation in the future.