Ups and downs of  enlargement process. Even though the enlargement was a priority for the German EU Presidency, no progress was reported in the negotiations on the accession of Albania and North Macedonia during the six months of German mandate. On the contrary, on January 1, when Portugal took over the EU Presidency from Germany, the expectations about enlargement were far lower than when its predecessor took this role. [1] Bulgaria blocked EU ministers’ talks on North Macedonia starting negotiations with the EU in November 2020. Nor Albania has begun its accession negotiations. These steps back are not the first symptoms of „the enlargement fatigue”, as the experts on European studies labelled it. A year earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron also rejected the formal opening of negotiations on EU membership for these two Balkan countries, sending a warning to the other aspiring candidate countries and the rest of the world that the EU has reached a critical point regarding the

enlargement process. As the UK has agreed to leave the EU, the debate about the limitations of the enlargement mechanism is all the more relevant. Brexit is the first experience for which there is still no specific concept contrary to the term enlargement. But the precedent has been set. The wave of skepticism regarding the enlargement mechanism has also increased as a result of dissatisfaction of some Western countries with illiberal regimes emerging from Poland and Hungary. At a time when the European Commission is trying to impose a rule of law mechanism for cutting funds to the governments that do not respect the rule of law, do the Balkan countries still have realistic chances of joining the EU? How the enlargement process started From a legal approach, the enlargement process was based on a principle written into the Rome treaty of March 25, 1957, Articole 237 - „any European State may apply to become a member of Community”. This…

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most problematic conflicts in the world, not because it was one of the deadliest, but because it is one of the longest-running conflicts and the most intractable. Despite many diplomatic efforts that have lasted for decades, it remains unresolved, feeding violence and hate on both sides. This conflict has also a unique specificity in the world: on every May 14, the Israelis celebrate the independence of the state of Israel, and a day later, only a few tens of kilometers away, their Palestinian neighbors commemorate a day of sadness, marked as the "catastrophe" – Nakba. In my essay I will try to explain why Jews and Palestinians could not find a secure way to live together, which were the most critical failed events of the great powers to solve the „Palestine problem” during the interwar period and how the Jews managed to declare the independence of the state of Israel. As Israeli novelist

Amos Oz once put it, „The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy; it is a clash between right and right. And therefore it’s not black and white. Sometimes, recently it is indeed a clash between wrong and wrong[1]”. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has no clear beginning. Jews and Arabs had been peacefully coexisting for centuries in the Ottoman Empire. The conflict slowly developed over time and the tensions gradually escalated at the end of the nineteenth century. The evolution of Zionism For a start, it is absolutely necessary an explanation of what the Zionist movement means in order to understand the history of the establishment of the state of Israel. The word “Zion” is a placename in the Hebrew Bible and it refers to one of the hills of ancient Jerusalem. Sometimes it applied to Jerusalem itself. The Zionist movement encompasses a large of different beliefs, from the spiritual ones to the nationalist secular ones. Religious Jews believe that the land of…