The European Union’s Eastern Enlargement: a guarantee of security or a security trap?

Eastern Enlargement is not only a promise of economic prosperity, better life standards and political stability, it also represents potential threats to the security dimension of the EU. We are referring to problems, which are already known to the Union, such as organized crime (drugs, weapons and human trafficking, money laundering), illegal immigration and terrorism, but whose scale might become even greater with the shifting of the Union’s border eastward and the entrance of the new Member States into the Schengen area. This paper proposes to demonstrate that the current security threats, which are unprecedented in the history of the Union, do not correspond to the classical concept of security. It also aims to show that the present actions of the EU are oriented towards immediate results and, consequently, unable to fight and prevent problems in the long run. The potential consequences of these actions are also analyzed to explain how counter-productive they may become. A comprehensive approach to these problems, however, could provide the Union with the adequate framework to develop a long term effective solution: a structure that would combine border controls, security and intelligence services, defence and external relations could be a good instrument to insure security within the Union’s borders.