Enlargements and Their Impact on EU Governance and Decision-Making

Abstract

This article examines the impact of enlargements on EU governance and decision-making, especially legislative decision-making. It is shown that all EU enlargement rounds, other than the first, have served to help improve the EU’s decision-making capacities, by promoting treaty and other changes that have made decision-making processes more efficient. The legislative outputs of the decision-making processes have declined in recent years, but this is for reasons other than enlargement.

Keywords

• Enlargements
• EU decision-making
• EU governance
• qualified majority voting