Pushing the Boundaries: DG Enlargement between Internal and External Environments. College of Europe EU Diplomacy Paper 7/2010

Studies of EU enlargement generally take as their subject the motivations for a country’s accession; rarely do they analyse in great detail any of the steps in the process itself. My contribution to the literature is an analysis of DG Enlargement in its role as a boundary spanner during the pre-accession period. One of the key boundary-spanning tasks exercised by the DG is to provide information about the organisation, its operations, and its management to the external environment. To answer the questions to what extent DG Enlargement can be characterised as a boundary spanner, and how the relevance of this characterisation might have changed over time, I examine DG Enlargement’s performance during the 2004 enlargement round and the critical self-assessment it undertook thereafter to determine whether lessons learnt have resulted in changed behaviour. In order to maximise evidence of boundary-spanning behaviour, I have chosen DG Enlargement’s management of the Copenhagen criterion of minority rights protection as my case study: with the condition absent from the acquis, DG ELARG must persuade membership aspirants to adopt this norm by other means. I will argue that DG Enlargement did act as a boundary spanner during the 2004 enlargement round, but that its assimilation of lessons learned has not dramatically affected its current behaviour. Despite disseminating the findings of its internal evaluations widely throughout the EU, political unwillingness to come to an agreement on common standards of minority rights protection prevents DG ELARG from improving its performance other than at the margins