Towards a new neighbourhood policy of the European union

Abstract

Horst Krenzler was one of the towering architects of the European Economic Area (EEA) Agreement. When, at the end of the 1980s, the European Communities focused on internal deepening and integration, the EEA offered European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries wider participation in the internal market, while staying outside in terms of European Union (EU) membership-for the time being. The EEA Agreement was construed to be a comfortable waiting room for EFTA members postponed in joining the Union. For the first time, an association agreement developed a sophisticated institutional architecture going beyond mixed committees and entailing rules on monitoring and judicial dispute settlement. Austria, Finland and Sweden subsequently joined the Union in 1995, while Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein opted to stay with the EEA. Switzerland, in a landmark referendum in December 1992, failed to join the EEA and subsequently embarked on a complicated trail of bilateral agreements. This effort eventually, and by 2004, largely substituted for the EEA, albeit not in an identical manner and with substantial differences, in particular in terms of institutional design.