ENLARGE

Enlargement should be understood as a central element in European integration, functioning as a primary instrument in the Community’s external relations as it transitioned countries from external partnerships to accession. During the Big Bang Enlargement (2004-2007), the EU experienced its most considerable accession, bringing 12 new Member States and changing the shape of the Union. Enlargement emerged as one of the most critical tools for achieving stability, democracy, and fostering robust external relations, becoming a key mechanism in redefining European space and security. But what twenty years ago appeared to be the realisation of a great European dream of unity, democracy, peace, and prosperity today no longer seems to be a political project shared both in the East and in the West by millions of European citizens. Can the EU still catalyse progress for its citizens and the globalised world? Progress built on peace, democracy, and sustainable development? 

Reconstructing the path of these twenty years of European integration can help to understand where the EU has accumulated delays and errors and where it has instead demonstrated virtuous behaviour. Going back to the origins of the process of enlargement to the East, rereading official documents, the scientific literature, in the perception of the elites and ordinary European citizens, thanks to the Eurobarometer and other tools, the expectations and projection towards the future of today would allow us to understand the state of the Union and project it towards the future of the twenty-first century. Only thanks to an extensive network of social science scholars belonging to Western and Eastern European universities and research centres would it be possible to obtain for the first time a holistic approach to European integration following the enlargement of 2004, capable of providing depth, innovation and originality to a reflection on the state of the EU that can no longer be postponed.

For the first time, a generation of students who grew up within the enlarged EU arrives at the desks of European universities; this generation represents the future of the EU; among them, there will be the protagonists of the success of the European institutions of the middle of this century. In the same way, a generation of scholars who have grown up in the last thirty years since the advent of the new Community construction and who have followed step by step the transformations of the EU offer this first young European generation their knowledge of the successes and failures of the European integration process.  In the same way, trying to understand the expectations of this new generation of young Europeans means designing a better future for the EU and giving whole meaning to the idea of progress.