The current accession countries experience an observable slowness in the pace of their European Union (EU) negotiations. This article aims to assess the impact of the EU’s changing enlargement strategy on this accession inertia. Our comparative analysis of the post-2004 negotiation experiences reveal that the variation in the technical accession progress can be explained by modalities of the new negotiation framework including the Copenhagen-plus pre-accession criteria, settlement of border conflicts, benchmarks and the increased focus on the rule of law chapters, which all together provided a new opportunity structure to those veto players seeking to suspend the accession of the current candidates.
European Foreign Affairs Review