20 years after the Big Bang
It's glossed over now, but many in Europe were against the 2004 EU enlargement to the former Eastern Bloc at the time. Has ever-larger union come at the expense of ever-closer union?
Twenty years ago today, on 1 May 2004, the European Union had its largest enlargement in history. The so-called “big bang”accession of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus (followed shortly after by Bulgaria and Romania) was the resolution of a decade-long debate during the 1990s over the future of the EU, and whether Europe should dive head-first into the reunification of its two halves that had been separated by the Cold War.
Today, people forget how heated this debate was in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, They also forget that reunification was driven mainly by political elites rather than the people (a 1989 poll by Der Spiegel found that the majority of people in West Germany wanted East Germany to remain a separate country). Former US Secretary of State James Baker has recalled that only the United States and West Germany were in favor of German reunification. The United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher and France under Francois Mitterrand had serious reservations. The fact that it happened was “nothing short of a miracle,” and it happened because of US insistence.