Bi-Lateral Disputes and the Politics of EU Enlargement

Studies of EU enlargement understandably focus on the relationship between the European Commission acting as agent for the Member States and the country seeking admission. Successive enlargements have generated, and continue to generate, substantial and sophisticated theoretical and empirical work on this relationship; this paper explores someting of a gap in these literatures. Central to the enlargement process is that Member States take a collective view of a country's application and that its progress (or not) towards EU membership is determined by whether or not the applicant satisfies the criteria laid down by the EU as a collectivity for membership. These criteria -- both policy and normative -- are 'European' criteria, so the process is concerned with the satisfaction of supra-national, not national criteria, and existing Member States are, therefore, advancing a collective supra-anational interest.

A relatively ignored aspect of this process is, however, the occurence of bi-lateral disputes between a Member State and a country seeking membership, a situation where the former uses (or threatens to) its ability to block progress towards membership in order to resolve a particular dispute. These can prove to be extremely contentious. Examples include disputes between Italy and Slovenia, Slovenia and Croatia, Greece and Macedonia, the UK and the Netherlands with Iceland. A basic requirement of the enlargement process is that Member States do not use the power asymmetry of enlargement to resolve bi-lateral disputes, and Member States have agreed to this, but the temptation to exploit this power asymmetry 'in the national interest' is considerable; what is significant is, perhaps, not that these disputes occur but that there are relativly few. This puzzle raises interesting questions about enlargement as a process of international bargaining between sovereign states where that bargaining is filtered by a supra-national body formally responsible for the conduct of negotiations; it also raises questions about the power of European norms in the determination by national governments of what constitutes the national interest and the relationship between national and supra-national concerns. These disputes also pose a significant head-ache for the Commission.

This paper explores an understudied aspect of enlargement but the questions raised go to the heart of the EU's nature as a supra-national actor, rainig questions about sovereignty, the national versus the EU interests, and the nature of multi-level bargaining.