Carles Boix* The Institutional Accomodation of an Enlarged Europe I n May 2004, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Malta, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined the European Union bringing the number of its members to 25. In a not too distant fu­ture, this number may well reach over 30, as several countries in the Balkans, such as Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia, as well as Turkey are accepted into the fold of the EU. Can the current European institutions and the Un­ion itself survive the process of enlargement? Can the European Union maintain its democratic and social na­ture as it includes some of the poorest countries of the continent? Must the European Union reform its institu­tions in a more drastic way than what has been ac­complished in the current constitutional draft? If so, how? Should the EU tighten its decision-making pro­cedures or should it decentralize its policy-making mechanisms? Should a two-speed Europe be put in place? What are the institutional and social pre­conditions that must be met to sustain and deepen the process of European integration? To answer these questions this paper anchors its analysis in current empirical democratic theory and ap­plies the latter’s theoretical propositions to assess the future development of the European Union. More spe­cifically, this paper is built as follows. In its first section the paper surveys the set of social and economic con­ditions under which democracies(mainly understood as a decision-making procedure but also as an institu­tional structure associated with advanced welfare re­gimes) are politically viable. In the second section the paper applies these insights to describe the most ap­propriate constitutional arrangements to resolve politi­cal disagreements between territories that differ in the nature of their interests. To put it briefly, a central im­plication of this analysis consists in showing that the degree to which political actors, regions or, for that matter, countries can pool their resources and policy­making procedures together in a feasible manner is a function of the extent to which their interests(and, particularly, their standards of living) are relatively ho­mogeneous. The third section then proceeds to use the preceding theoretical discussion to shed light on the case of the European Union. It accordingly outlines * The University of Chicago, Department of Political Science. several of the consequences of the current enlarge­ment and makes a few recommendations about the type of constitutional configuration that may be most adequate to sustain a working European Union. Democratic Theory To determine which are the most appropriate proce­dures to govern the European Union, that is, to estab­lish the extent to which its members may be willing to pool their resources and authority together, I first pro­ceed to delineate the conditions under which a democ­racy is a viable system of government for a given terri­tory and population. Let me start by noting that a democracy consists of a procedure through which its citizens decide by cast­ing a vote or a sequence of votes how to govern them­selves- that is, what rules should bind their collective life, which should be the optimal distribution of assets and so on. This mechanism of decision implies that, once a vote is conducted over a certain issue, the majority of the population determines the position(or welfare) of each member of the population and therefore of the minority that has not agreed with that majority. In other words, in a democracy the minority is subjected to the will of the majority. If that is the case, that is, if in a democracy the mi­nority remains at the mercy of the majority, it is plain that a democratic regime will only become possible if the minority nonetheless accepts the electoral outcome in which it participates. Now, since the definition and composition of the minority may vary with each issue or decision put to a vote, we can restate the same idea in more general terms. We will say that a democracy will only be possible if their participating agents accept the possibility that the outcome generated by a popu­lar vote may differ from their most preferred alterna­tive. To shed more light on this question, consider it in a slightly more specific manner in the context of a repre­sentative democracy where two candidates compete for a given political office, i.e. the presidency of the state. After both candidates engage in an electoral campaign and voters cast their ballots, the candidate