ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗ ΚΑΙ ΑΠΟΨΕΙΣ

1. INTRODUCTION The European Union (EU) is one of the most prominent and powerful international organization in the world. The effectiveness of its power, both soft and hard, emanates from the credibility, reliability, stability, strength, impact, influence, extent, and magnitude of its members states. From the creation of the European Atomic Energy Community and the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, the EU has considerably changed both in size and in its institutions. At the same time political and economic transformations and revolutions like and the restoration of democracy in Portugal, Spain and Greece and the communist collapse in 1989 triggered the necessity for an enlarged EU. The transition from the EEC to the EU was at the same time a prerequisite and a necessity for the stability of the European community. However, even though the 2004-2007 European enlargements were successful in many respects, they caused growing anxieties for the future of the process itself. In

The Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was primarily designed in the Treaty of the European Union (TEU) in 1991 at Maastricht as an outcome of bargaining among governments (Moravcsik, 1998; Hosli, 2000). The unique project was completed in 1999 when the Euro became the official currency for the first eleven European countries. In 2000, the Council declared that Greece fulfilled the four Maastricht economic criteria and became the twelfth member of the EMU. Even though, in 2000 the third stage of the Delors Report was successfully completed, from 1989 many scholars expressed their doubts about the usefulness and the long run sustainability of the remarkable and unprecedented European project. During the last twenty years they have mainly used the Optimal Currency Area (OCA) theory as an analytical approach in order to evaluate whether or not EMU is sustainable in the long run. According to their conclusions, the EMU is not regarded as an OCA and thus they adopted a more skeptical and c