The head of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee is preparing a scathing response to the European Commission's recently -published strategy on how to deal with enlargement in the future, EUobserver reported.

Drawn up by centre-right MEP Elmar Brok, the short report is still in draft version. It castigates the commission for ducking hard decisions on further expansion of the bloc "[regretting] the failure to provide a serious analysis of the issues which need to be resolved before the Union can proceed with further enlargements."

With Bulgaria and Romania to join in January and a series of Western Balkan countries as well as Turkey all lining up to join the bloc, the Brok report notes that "overstretching the internal capacity of the EU can weaken the EU internally and externally and this cannot be compensated by increased external size."

According to Elmar Brok the commission has sidestepped all of the tricky issues such as what to do about institutional reform, how to pay for future enlargement and what political criteria should form the basis of future decisions.

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