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Why widening makes deepening: unintended policy extension through polity expansion

ABSTRACT By analysing widening as the cause of deepening, the contribution examines unintended effects of enlargement. During the Eastern enlargement process, the European Commission was assigned competences vis-à-vis the candidate states which exceeded the powers formally conferred to it by the European Union acquis. During the pre-accession phase, the Commission thus implemented double standards that applied to candidate states but not to members. However, these special capacities did not expire in all policies, as expected. Theoretically, this raises the question: Under which conditions does policy-making lead to an increase of supranational capacities? The contribution concludes that widening produces systematic pressure for the deepening of supranational policy-making capacities. Whether such deepening persists depends not only on the interplay of actor preferences and institutional contexts, but to a decisive extent on the actual policy type that is institutionalized. Along these lines, the policy-making exercised in the most recent widening rounds did indeed cause deepening.