From Roadmap to Prescribed Itinerary

This article aims at understanding the transformations of the enlargement policy during the 2000’s. It focuses on the relation between EU’s institutions, analyzes their official statements from 2004 to 2006, and puts emphasis on their interactions and unexpected results. In a context favoring the politicization of the EU enlargement but without allowing the possibility of any official reform, policy tools have been mainly impacted by incremental changes. The process of rethinking the tools led in turn to a comprehensive renewal of the enlargement methodology, bringing fundamental changes. Indeed, the new methodology calls into question one of the key policy components (the pre-accession strategy) and challenges the policy paradigm of conditionality.