EU Keeps Reform Process on Track for Prospective Member Countries

Barry Wood
Washington
14 Oct 2003, 22:05 UTC

At Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center Tuesday a university researcher

on the Balkans, Milada Vachudova, credited the European Union with
having a very positive impact in generating democratic and market-based
reforms in prospective member countries.

Ms. Vachudova says 14 years after communism collapsed in Europe the EU

deserves credit for keeping the reform process on track. She argues that by
emphasizing openness and civic responsibility EU membership
requirements foster democratic procedures, even in applicant countries with no tradition of liberal
democracy.

While she admits that the EU's 80,000 pages of regulations that prospective members must adopt
are excessively bureaucratic, she says they also enhance minority rights and political pluralism.
Thus, says the University of North Carolina political scientist, it is no coincidence that the eight east
European nations that will join the EU next May have achieved a degree of political stability few
experts thought possible only 10 years ago.

As evidence of the EU's salutary impact, she points to Slovakia, which in just six years has made an
impressive reversal from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. With luck, she says, the same
process could apply in the Balkans.

Ms. Vachudova, an American of Czech ancestry, was asked if she believes

that Romania and Bulgaria are likely to join the EU as early as 2007.

"The question you should ask is whether I think Bulgaria and Romania will
be qualified to join in 2007. I think Bulgaria will be. I don't think Romania
will be," she said. "And I think what well may happen is that Romania will
get in because it would be inconvenient to have Romania waiting longer.
But it is also possible that both Romania and Bulgaria will both wait until
Milada Vachudova Croatia is ready and the three will join together."
VOA photo - B. Wood
Ms. Vachudova says aside from Croatia, it will be a long time before any other Balkan nation wins
approval to join the EU. Turkey, she says, is a separate issue on which the EU is likely to make a
decision within the next year. Brussels, she says, is aware that it has made a significant error over
the past decade in vacillating on whether it really wants heavily populated and Muslim Turkey to
become a member.