Economic and Social Balance of 15 Years of Eastern Enlargement

Abstract

The Eastern EU enlargement (2004, 2007, 2013) is still one of the success stories of the EU (and unprecedented in the world), but at the same time it is controversial and is perceived as controversial. One of the core problems has been its unbalanced character: the whole process had a clear `Single Market` focus and the values of a `Social Europe` were of secondary importance. Based on a neofunctionalist approach the paper discusses the integration of the new member states from the point of view of economic and income convergence. Along with a literature review, data on wages, productivity and output will be analysed to demonstrate that upward convergence of the poorer new member states towards the EU average had been stalled in wake of the 2009 crisis. The resulting cleavages put the core hypothesis of the neofunctionalist approach - that EU integration has a `direction` in terms of an upwards convergence - into question.