Strategic Aspects of the 1995 and 2004 EU Enlargements

We discuss the two latest enlargements of the EU. While the 1995 entrants are by now fully integrated, the 2004 entrants will ``enjoy'''' a secondary status for a number of years. We attribute this difference to the fact that unlike the former EFTA members joining in 1995, the 2004 entrants formed a group with heterogenous interests, one that lacked the same strong internal economic ties. Not being able to act as a unified block they had a considerably weaker bargaining position. We support our arguments by qualitative results from a simple model, a dynamic partition function game based on Yi (1997) and Morelli and Penelle (1997).