Developments in the New Member States and Applicant Countries

On 1 May 2004 ten candidate countries changed their status to that of new Member States. Eight of them – the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia – had been communist regimes only 15 years previously. However, although they had mastered rapid and radical transformation in order to consolidate democracy and a ‘return to Europe’, their domestic political systems still showed signs of instability that distinguished them from the ‘old’ Member States. Half of them changed Prime Minister during the course of 2004 without having a parliamentary election, and their first European Parliament elections in June demonstrated some marked discontinuities in party systems. Four candidate states remained after the first wave of eastern enlargement – Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey – and Macedonia also applied in March 2004 to join. In these countries, the pressure of the EU accession process on the domestic political scene was more explicit than it had been in the central European states, where the entire economic and political reform project of the early post-communist years had coincided with the drive to join the EU. By 2004, the external rules of the game for aspiring members with democratic weaknesses were well established, and thereby fixed the parameters within which politicians and parties could act at home

Accession · Communism · Czech · Democracy · Economic policy · Economics · Economy · European union · Member states · Parliament · Political economy · Political science · Politics · European Union Policy and Governance · Law

• EU membership and the press

  Open Access•Sophie Lecheler•Journalism•2008

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• The structure and evolution of trade in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s

  Manuel Palazuelos-Martinez•Europe Asia Studies•2007

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