EU Enlargement: Flexible Compliance with the Commission's Pre-Accession Demands and Schnittke's Ideas on Music

Abstract

The paper explores the effectiveness of the application of the pre-accession principle of conditionality during the preparation of the fifth enlargement of the European Union, concluding that while the system of the Copenhagen-related documents devised in the course of the pre-accession could be efficient when formally applied, the Commission managed to achieve pre-accession results more through informal influence than with the use of the formal tools of EU enlargement law. Parallels with some aspects of Schnittke's musicology are used to illustrate this point.

Keywords: EU law, enlargement, pre-accession, Copenhagen criteria, Copenhagen-related documents, conditionality, enlargement law, pre-accession