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The future enlargement of the European Union is theoretically open to any European country which is democratic, operates a free market and is willing and able to implement all previous European Union law. Past enlargement has brought membership from six to twenty-eight members since the foundation of the European Union (EU) as the European Economic Community〔Current Article 1 of the Treaty on European Union reads:"The Union shall be founded on the present Treaty and on the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Those two Treaties shall have the same legal value. The Union shall replace and succeed the European Community".〕 by the Inner Six in 1958. The accession criteria are included in the Copenhagen criteria, agreed in 1993, and the Treaty of Maastricht (Article 49). Whether a country is European or not is subject to political assessment by the EU institutions. There are five recognised candidates for membership:〔 Turkey (applied in 1987), Macedonia (applied in 2004), Montenegro (applied in 2008), Albania (applied in 2009) and Serbia (applied in 2009). All candidate countries except Albania and Macedonia have started accession negotiations.〔 Kosovo *, whose independence is not recognised by five EU member states, and Bosnia and Herzegovina are recognised as potential candidates for membership by the EU.〔 Bosnia-Herzegovina has a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU, which generally precede the lodging of membership applications, while Kosovo has signed its own SAA.〔 The three major western European countries which are not EU members, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, have all submitted membership applications in the past, but subsequently froze them. According to an Eastern Partnership strategy, the EU is unlikely to invite any more of its post-Soviet neighbours to join the bloc before 2020. However, in 2014 the EU signed Association Agreements with Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine,〔 and the European Parliament passed a resolution recognising the "European prospective" of all three countries.〔 ==Current agenda== The present enlargement agenda of the European Union regards Turkey and the Western Balkans. Turkey has a long-standing application with the EU, but their negotiations are expected to take until at least 2023. As for the Western Balkan states, the EU had pledged to include them after their civil wars: in fact, two states have entered, four are candidates and the others have pre-accession agreements. There are however other states in Europe which either seek membership or could potentially apply if their present foreign policy changes, or the EU gives a signal that they might now be included on the enlargement agenda. However, these are not formally part of the current agenda, which is already delayed due to bilateral disputes in the Balkans and difficulty in fully implementing the ''acquis communautaire'' (the accepted body of EU law). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Future enlargement of the European Union」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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