25 Years of EU Enlargement

25th Anniversary of the 2004 EU Enlargement

Sixth joint issue of the European Union. All 21 euro-area states are issuing a coin with the same design on varying dates. The coins differ only in the inscription, which appears in each country's national language.

For Italy, the EU enlargement of 1 May 2004 was a turning point in the history of European integration, a process the Italian Republic had helped shape from the very beginning. Ten new member states — including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, the three Baltic states, as well as Malta and Cyprus — joined the Union, completing decades of rapprochement between Western and Eastern Europe. This step was the result of complex accession negotiations based on the 1993 Copenhagen criteria, which required candidate countries to undertake profound economic, legal and democratic reforms. Italy, a founding member of the European Communities since the 1957 Treaties of Rome, politically supported the enlargement policy and benefited economically from new markets and a deepened internal market.

The 2004 enlargement was the largest in EU history and raised the number of member states to 25. It marked the end of the division of Europe caused by the Second World War and the Iron Curtain, permanently anchoring the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe within Western institutional structures. For European cohesion, this accession was as symbolically as it was structurally significant: it created a shared legal and economic area stretching from Lisbon to Tallinn. In 2029, Italy marks the 25th anniversary of this historic enlargement step with a 2-euro commemorative coin, recalling the foundation of today's Europe of 27 member states.