The article summarized the negotiation process among the EU and Eastern Europe candidate countries. Political and economic conditionality has been applied by the EU Commission in a quite neutral way. Governments did not deeply modify those criteria for security reasons or for patron-client relations. Some flexibility was shown during the process, but the final outcome was fair. For example, Bulgaria and Romania were rewarded for their tacit support of the Nato military intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Estonia and Latvia did not implement radical changes in their legislation for Russian citizens' rights.
