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Despite "fatigue" setting in amongst EU member states as a result of the ongoing economic crisis, the process of enlargement of the bloc should not be neglected, the Czech deputy prime minister, Alexandr Vondra, said on Wednesday (18 February).

But the pace of the process has slowed down in recent months as several other issues, most notably the global financial crisis, attract much of the EU's attention. Additionally, some candidate countries face blockages due to political disputes with individual EU states. The border dispute between Slovenia and Croatia, which provoked Ljubljana to block the opening or closing of 11 chapters from Croatia's EU accession negotiations package in December, is only the most recent such dust-up.

Enlargement is good for you Meanwhile, the European Commission will on Friday publish a detailed report on the benefits of the EU's two latest enlargements - in 2004 and 2007 - taking in a total of 12 member states.

EU leaders are meeting in Brussels on Thursday and Friday to discuss the best ways to get out of the economic crisis. But despite some calls to spend more to support the bloc's ailing economies, most of the attention is expected to be focused on the need for better regulation of the financial sector and on "fine-tuning" the existing European economic stimulus package.

In the face of the persisting economic turmoil, France and Germany's leaders sent a letter to the Czech EU presidency and to the president of the European Commission on Tuesday reiterating what they see as an urgent need to reform the financial system. "The top priority is building up the new global financial architecture. The European Union must affirm a common position and take the lead in this process," French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote.

EU officials on Wednesday hailed Bosnia's adoption of long-disputed police reforms, saying it opened the way for the Baltic state to sign the first accord on the way to European Union membership. "I welcome the final adoption of the police reform laws, which paves the way towards signing the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA)," EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said in a statement. The SAA trade and aid pact "will not only bring practical benefits in trade and thus for the economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but it is also the gateway towards candidate country status for EU accession," Rehn added.

Earlier Wednesday lawmakers in Bosnia's upper house definitively adopted the police reforms, removing the last hurdle for the country to sign the key pact on closer EU ties. Two police reform bills passed by 10 to four votes, ending years of dispute among Bosnia's Croat, Muslim and Serb leaders about the extent to which they should integrate the country's separate ethnic police forces. The lower house of the Bosnian parliament approved the reforms last week.

16 June 2008 Luxembourg _ Bosnia and Herzegovina has signed a key pre-membership deal with the EU and taken its first crucial step towards the bloc.

The agreement outlines key legal and institutional reforms Bosnia will have to implement in the next six years in the areas of customs, trade, administration, economy and social services. Local and international officials have already hailed signing of the agreement as the second most important document for Bosnia after the Dayton peace accord, which ended the 1992-1995 war and provided a blueprint for Bosnia’s current administrative and political setup.

According to the Eurostat scoreboard - based on 2006 figures - there are ocean wide gaps between EU member states when it comes to the purchasing power of their citizens. The figures vary from 37 to 280 percent of the EU-27 average.

The event – seen as the completion of the fifth EU enlargement which began in 2004 – will see the EU's population swell from 463 million people to 493 million, its economy grow from €10.8 trillion to €10.9 trillion (the biggest single market in the world) and create new EU borders with Moldova and the Black Sea.

Each wave of expansion of the European Union has led to political tensions and conflict. Existing members fear their membership privileges will diminish and candidates are loath to concede the expected benefits of membership. Despite these conflicts, enlargement has always succeeded - so why does the EU continue to admit new states even though current members might lose from their accession? Combining political economy logic with statistical and case study analyses, Christina J. Schneider argues that the dominant theories of EU enlargement ignore how EU members and applicant states negotiate the distribution of enlargement benefits and costs. She explains that EU enlargement happens despite distributional conflicts if the overall gains of enlargement are redistributed from the relative winners among existing members and applicants to the relative losers. If the overall gains from enlargement are sufficiently great, a redistribution of these gains will compensate losers, making enlargement attractive for all states.• Offers an in-depth overview of existing literature on EU integration and enlargement • Features past enlargements, the formal enlargement process, and other information relevant for EU enlargement • Includes a combination of different methods: game-theory, quantitative analysis and case studiesContents1. Introduction; 2. EU enlargements and transitional periods; 3. A rationalist puzzle of EU enlargement?; 4. A theory of discriminatory membership; 5. EU enlargement, distributional conflicts, and the demand for compensation; 6. The discriminatory of membership; 7. Discriminatory membership and intra-union redistribution; 8. Conclusion.