Europe and the Concept of Enlargement.

The idealistic rationale of European enlargement has a deeply practical side to it. When the European Community took in Greece, Spain and Portugal in the early 1980s, the principal objective was to shore up the democracies that had emerged after the collapse of more authoritarian regimes. A similar objective lies behind the present enlargement. Specifically, the European Union's expansion to the east and south is an attempt at risk management: the major economic transformations underway in Eastern Europe have unleashed forces that -- while not unfamiliar in most advanced industrial societies -- could topple fledgling democracies. This challenge is different from that confronted in the case of Greece, Spain and Portugal, not only because of the greater disparities in economic capacity between the candidate countries and existing member states, but also given the difficulty of stabilising political regimes through the process of developing market economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]