The "New Politics" of EU's Eastern Enlargement

The paper gives an overview of EU's eastern enlargement and draws some theoretical conclusions. In particular, it stresses the point that the EU member states in the process of enlargement have entered a phase of "new politics", characterised by multilateralism, conditionality, help and binding agreements. They gained strong influence over their surroundings, and ,albeit they had to give up substantil parts of de-facto sovereingty, they are much better off than before, in particular in terms of security. EU's "new politics" are a successful alternative model to the "old politics", represented e.g. by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld