The process of enlargement would be facilitated if the EU and the candidates were less concerned about the date of accession and more keen to focus their efforts instead on identifying ways, on the one hand, to translate collective benefits into individual national benefits so that all member states would support enlargement and, on the other, to assess the readiness of the candidates with more precise criteria. Because of the nature of the negotiations, these two apparently unrelated problems are de facto interconnected. One way for the successful completion of the accession negotiations . is for these two issues to be formally de-linked.
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