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The transforming role of the European Commission in the EU integration process

Within the current geopolitical atmosphere of instability and insecurity on the eastern borders of the EU, enlargement has resurfaced as a topic of high priority, being a basic condition for the future of European integration. The effectiveness of EU enlargement policy, largely considered as the most successful EU policy, is starting to raise serious concerns. A key problem of the EU’s approach so far has been the extreme role of the European Commission as a political actor conducting a discretionary policy, hidden behind the claim of a completely strict, objective assessment based on the merits of the candidate countries. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative empirical analysis, and using the symptomatic example of Bulgaria, this article aims to understand how the Commission has perceived the specificities of the task of expanding to the post-communist countries of central and eastern Europe and how, based on this perception, it has built its interaction with them. The author concludes that the failures of the policy need to be remedied if future enlargements to the western Balkans are to be successful.