Eastern Enlargement and Portugal

The paper is structured in two parts. The first one analyses the proposals of the European Commission concerning the reform of the European Union policies and the Eastern enlargement, set out in Agenda 2000. The second addresses the impacts of the Eastern enlargement to Portugal. The paper reviews the standard argument against the Eastern enlargement and presents evidence that an once and for all enlargement of all the ten Central and Eastern European Countries that applied for EU membership is unlikely to occur. The paper overlooks the competitive pressures the Eastern enlargement implies and provides indication that it is essentially a political process.