Safe Havens for Market Reforms: Membership in the EU and Other International Organizations

The Community has taken the necessary decisions to strengthen its co-operation … with States which intend their founding principles to be democracy pluralism and the rule-of-law. It … will continue its examination of the appropriate forms of Association with the countries which are pursuing the path of economic and political reform. (Statement of the EU Strasbourg Summit, 12 December 1989)1 Was the above an invitation to EU membership for the countries to the east of the Berlin Wall? Of course it was, albeit its terms were already a bit more guarded and constrained than earlier political statements welcoming these countries and calling for new initiatives to respond to their needs. Thus, for example, Chancellor Kohl insisted at the G-7 Summit in June 1990 on including a reference to East European integration and more concretely: ‘to ask the European Commission to take the necessary initiatives … and to associate … all interested countries’. The Commission’s first response was to establish the PHARE programme of economic assistance to Central Europe, but it then went further, preparing the Strasbourg Statement cited above. As a good bureaucracy with the duty of reining in the flourishes of politicians, the Commission enshrined in the Strasbourg Statement an initial cautionary principle: ‘the legal basis of forthcoming negotiations was to be Article 238 (Association); not Article 237 (Accesssion) as many East European governments had hoped’.2