25 Years of EU Enlargement

25th Anniversary of the 2004 EU Enlargement

Sixth joint issue of the European Union. All 21 eurozone states are issuing a coin with the same design on varying dates. The coins differ only in their inscriptions, which appear in the respective national language.

On 1 May 2004, Slovenia joined the European Union together with nine other states — a date marking the largest enlargement step in the history of the EU up to that point. Alongside Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Malta and Cyprus also joined. For Slovenia, accession marked the provisional conclusion of a profound transformation process: less than thirteen years after independence from Yugoslavia, the country had built democratic institutions, developed a stable market economy and met the EU accession criteria. The foundation for this had been laid by the Association Agreement with the European Community, which had already entered into force in 1996; formal accession negotiations began in 1998.

Slovenia was among the most economically developed of the new member states, which also made it something of a special case: it was the first of the then new members to introduce the euro, on 1 January 2007. The 2004 EU enlargement substantially changed the geopolitical weight of the Union — its population rose by around 75 million and its territory grew by about a quarter. From a Slovenian perspective, accession was not least a return to a Central European framework to which the country had always culturally and historically belonged. The year 2029 marks the 25th anniversary of this accession — Slovenia celebrates the jubilee with the issue of this 2-euro commemorative coin.