Drawing the line: the EU's political accession criteria and the construction of membership

In this paper I seek to explicate the ideas about EU membership embedded in the accession
criteria, and in the pre-accession monitoring of Poland, Romania and Turkey. Taking four idealtype modes of membership as my heuristic gear, I will show that the way the criteria were
interpreted and implemented in the ‘progress towards accession’ reports, thickened the criteria
and invoked a Civic-Cultural mode of membership for the EU. Two conclusions emerge: First
there is a substantial degree of internal logic to the reports. The second conclusion is that the
interpretation and reconstruction of the criteria, through the practice of pre-accession monitoring,
entails an inherent amplification of the criteria.