ABSTRACT
The Europe which saw the light in 1990 had overcome a forty-year division without significant violence. Few would have imagined that one of the EEC’s original goals (‘to overcome the division of the peoples of Europe’) could have been achieved so easily and at so little cost. Having successfully encouraged political and economic reforms in Eastern Europe, the Community’s next challenge was to assure the success of these reforms and help these countries return to the West. Thus, the EC’s initial policy of conditionality was soon replaced by a new policy of association. However, the prospect of the eventual accession of the associated countries to the Community, together with the question of the sharing out of the costs of trade liberalisation with Eastern Europe, plagued this policy with tensions and contradictions. Formally, all member states would agree to embark on this policy of association, but this agreement was more apparent than real. In practice, EC’s Ostpolitik would prove to be as divisive as ever.
