Lobbying, Bargaining and EU Enlargement

The past fifty years of European integration can be seen as the result of a two-level political game: at home national governments interacted strategically with organized interest groups, while in the European arena interstate distributional conflicts were solved by bargaining. Applying this scheme to the actual process of Enlargement to Eastern and Central European nations we show that, if there is a surplus from political integration, all countries receive a positive benefit from Enlargement. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, being the outcomes of the bargaining process shaped by relative power, our results suggest that EU members could gain more from Enlargement than entering countries.