10.1177/0010414002239375ARTICLECOMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES / February-March 2003Schimmelfennig / EAS ERN ENLARGEMENT OF EU STRATEGIC ACTION IN A COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENT The Decision to Enlarge the European Union to the East

In this article, the author proposes a synthetic approach to the analysis of institutional effects on EU policy making by combining a rationalist theory of action with a constructivist assumption on the social environment: Actors in European integration act strategically on the basis of indi-vidual specific policy preferences but do so in a community environment that affects their strate-gies and the collective interaction outcome. This synthetic approach draws on the work of Erving Goffman and is based on the “sequencing ” of rationalist and constructivist propositions. Further-more, this approach will be most salient when the institutional rules in question are constitutive and legitimate and resonate with national values and norms. Following the design of controlled competition, the author argues that this sequencing better explains the EU’s decision to expand to the East than either rationalist or constructivist propositions alone