Can EU Enlargement Work?

Not that long ago, enlargement was a second-order priority for the EU: never off the radar but never really a top agenda item either. Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine changed all that, almost at a stroke. EU leaders have embraced enlargement policy as a part of the union’s response, on a par with weapons deliveries to Kyiv and economic sanctions on Moscow. The twenty-seven-strong bloc has made decisions that few could have foreseen before the war began in 2022. In December 2023, the European Council resolved to open accession talks with Moldova and Ukraine and grant Georgia candidate country status. Bosnia and Herzegovina received an invitation to start accession negotiations three months later.

Yet, these moves also triggered much deliberation and anxiety. Debates on the strategic and institutional implications of the EU’s expansion to a sizable country such as Ukraine, which is at war with a large, nuclear-armed great-power neighbor, fuel a steady stream of policy publications and make regular appearances on editorial pages. In September 2023, senior diplomats from France and Germany issued a joint nonpaper that listed proposals to reorganize the EU to allow it to absorb new entrants from Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. All in all, the EU’s eastward expansion is firmly back in the spotlight and is no longer a niche subject.

Despite this renewed attention, the initial momentum of EU enlargement is wearing off. While enlargement remains a worthwhile goal, the stakeholders involved will have to moderate their expectations. The EU will not expand rapidly in the coming years, although it may develop flexible forms of integration with membership hopefuls. To make enlargement work, the EU should focus on galvanizing political support among societies in the candidate countries.

EU enlargement is part of an overarching strategy whose ultimate aim is to consolidate the union’s leadership in what could be called “wider Europe.” Three other planks in this strategy stand out. The first is narrowing the gap with a post-Brexit UK. The 2023 Windsor Framework mapped a path to ironing out the dispute between Brussels and London over the legal arrangements for Northern Ireland. Second, the EU is in engagement mode with Turkey, another sizable neighbor whose geopolitical clout spans Eurasia, the Middle East, and Africa. Ongoing efforts to update the EU-Turkey Customs Union and renew a 2016 agreement on refugees form the core of the agenda. Last but not least is the European Political Community (EPC), a loose association of countries originally proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron that holds annual summits.

The common denominator in these initiatives is resolve to oppose Russia. When it comes to enlargement, the EU’s approach is driven by an understanding that stronger institutional and functional links will create the conditions for stability and resilience on the union’s periphery. Of course, this reading is not necessarily shared by partner countries such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, or Turkey, which see no benefit in taking a clear side in the clash between Russia and the West that was triggered by the invasion of Ukraine. For them, participation in the EPC and bilateral links with the EU are parts of a broader balancing act. Still, Brussels’s policy design is about excluding and isolating Russia, which was not necessarily the case in 2009, when the EU launched its Eastern Partnership to govern relations with six Eastern European and South Caucasus countries.

With this political momentum in mind, a positive scenario going forward into the 2030s is an EU of some thirty member states. One or two Western Balkan countries could join the union as full-fledged members. The rest will be closely integrated into its institutions and policies while proceeding along the arduous track of accession talks. Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine will be drawn deeper into the EU’s ecosystem thanks to the union’s money, institutions, and policies, despite the formidable challenges to their sovereignty and stability. The EU’s sphere of influence will become an even more palpable reality than it is today.

Among the potential beneficiaries of the EU’s renewed emphasis on enlargement are the six countries in the Western Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. The new momentum has accelerated their efforts toward accession and improved their chances. Bosnia, for instance, was praised by the European Commission’s 2023 report on the country’s progress toward accession for its reforms to combat corruption, money laundering, terrorism, and illegal migration. In March 2024, EU leaders endorsed the commission’s proposal to start membership talks with the state.

Farther south, Montenegro is making headway toward meeting the EU’s benchmarks, for example on long-delayed appointments in the judiciary, in a move that may help accelerate the country’s accession negotiations, which have been underway since 2012. Even though Podgorica has closed only a handful of chapters of the talks, Montenegrin Prime Minister Milojko Spajić and President Jakov Milatović enthusiastically speak of 2028 as an accession target date.

This ambition chimes with the mood among EU officials and national leaders. European Council President Charles Michel said in 2023 that the EU should be ready for enlargement by 2030. The region’s neighbors, including Austria and Hungary, are advocating vigorously for the Western Balkans—although, in Hungary’s case, the objective appears to be the entry into the EU of like-minded states governed by illiberal elites. Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg argued in November 2023 that the region should not be confined to “the service lane” while Moldova and Ukraine are fast-tracked. Both Austria and Hungary have substantial foreign direct investment portfolios as well as troops in the Western Balkans thanks to multilateral missions, such as the EU Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUFOR) and NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR).

Therefore, just as Poland and the Baltics are making the case for Ukraine’s EU membership and Romania is championing Moldova’s, so the Western Balkans have their advocates, too. Croatia and Slovenia take a similar view to their Central European peers. Big EU member states also seem to look favorably on the region. During an April 2024 visit to Berlin, Spajić received encouragement from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for his effort to speed up Montenegro’s accession. In France, Macron has pivoted to a pro-enlargement position too, again compelled by Europe’s changed geopolitical balance.

The EU has upped its economic game in the Western Balkans. In November 2023, the commission adopted a new growth plan that aims to pump €2 billion ($2.2 billion) in grants and €4 billion ($4.3 billion) in concessional loans into the region by 2028. The union’s underlying ambition is to double the size of the region’s economies, whose combined GDP currently stands at around €104 billion ($113 billion). Half of the money pledged by the EU has been earmarked to support institutional reforms. The plan foresees the creation of a regional common market as a stepping stone toward inclusion in the EU’s single market, even before membership. Deeper integration should make the Western Balkans attractive to foreign investors, notably companies based in the union’s members. Of course, the growth plan’s allocations pale in comparison to the €50 billion ($54 billion) made available for Ukraine, whose population of 37 million is more than twice that of the six Western Balkan countries together.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has transformed the Eastern Partnership into a vehicle for enlargement. On February 28, 2022, four days into the war, Kyiv officially applied for EU membership. By the end of the year, the European Council had granted Ukraine as well as Moldova candidate country status, and in late 2023 the two states were invited to start accession talks. The first intergovernmental conference between EU member states and the candidate countries—the forum in which negotiations take place—is slated for June 2024. Through the conferences, the EU will assess the candidates’ levels of harmonization with the acquis, or body of EU law, since they signed Association Agreements with the union in 2013 and 2014.

Integration is proceeding at the levels of the economy and society, too. Even before the Russian invasion, the union was Ukraine’s largest trading partner, accounting for around 55 percent of the country’s total trade in goods in 2022. The EU enjoys the same status in Moldova, and over 65 percent of Moldovan exports were destined for the bloc in 2023. The union’s massive financial aid for Ukraine and the presence of millions of Ukrainians in the member states likewise produce a strong bond. There is a sizable Moldovan diaspora, too, although numbers are harder to pin down because many Moldovans living in the EU use the Romanian passports for which many of them are eligible.

Georgia is likewise gravitating toward the EU. There is a political consensus in the country in favor of membership; this consensus extends to the governing Georgian Dream party, which simultaneously pursues Russia-friendly policies. In December 2023, Tbilisi obtained EU candidate country status despite the commission’s reservations about democratic backsliding. The EU is Georgia’s main trading partner, although the bloc’s share in the country’s trade, at 21 percent, is not that far ahead of those of Turkey (15 percent) and Russia (13 percent). Georgia’s exports to Russia have increased since the invasion of Ukraine, as Georgia has become a backdoor for Western goods.

EU enlargement is far from an unqualified success story, to put it mildly. The Western Balkan states were promised membership back in June 2003. More than twenty years later, they are still at the EU’s gates. The fact that their accession prospects have barely moved forward since Croatia’s 2013 entry is revealing about the hurdles in the process. Moldova and Ukraine are certain to encounter the same roadblocks—and worse, given the ongoing war, their geographic locations and historical legacies, and their domestic characteristics. There are three factors that will throw a wrench into the works when it comes to future enlargement: security challenges, bilateral disputes, and domestic politics in the potential new member states.

In principle, EU membership should be a silver bullet that helps resolve political tensions and fosters cross-border reconciliation and the inclusion of minorities. In practice, however, that is not necessarily the case. For a decade now, successive EU foreign policy high representatives have failed to get Serbia and Kosovo to reach a settlement in their dispute about issues of sovereignty and self-determination. The endgame for Kosovo has been clear since 2013, when the two sides concluded the Brussels Agreement, brokered by the then high representative, Catherine Ashton. It involves the de facto recognition of Kosovar statehood in exchange for self-government for Serb-majority municipalities in northern Kosovo. The same grand bargain was enshrined in another deal forged in March 2023 though not signed by either party.

However, in a situation in which Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti distrust one another and focus on scoring points against the other side, and with the perspective of EU membership remote at best, a settlement remains elusive. All in all, the unresolved Kosovo issue will prevent Serbia from making headway on its EU accession track and probably provide enough political cover for Vučić to cement his position domestically. Kosovo’s EU ambitions, too, are held hostage by the unresolved dispute.

Looking at the Eastern neighborhood, territorial disputes will no doubt weigh on Ukraine’s, Moldova’s, and Georgia’s efforts to join the EU, too. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has ushered in a protracted war that poses an existential threat to the state. Even if stemmed, the Russian onslaught will result in the occupation of large swaths of Ukrainian territory beyond the pre–February 2022 line of contact. For the EU, incorporating a country that is at war—or, indeed, that is recuperating from a devastating conflict with a significant piece of its land under de facto Russian sovereignty—is a formidable challenge. Moldova and Georgia face issues of their own related to the breakaway regions of Transnistria in the former and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the latter. Even if the accession process speeds up, EU diplomats will struggle to find creative solutions to such disputes, to which Russia is a party.

On April 8, 2024, the European Parliament and the EU Council restricted the entry into the union of Ukrainian agricultural products. The imposition of agricultural quotas came after a year of tensions, with EU governments in Central and Eastern Europe initially imposing unilateral restrictions in response to protests by farmers angry at being undercut by cheap Ukrainian produce. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk took credit for the EU-level compromise reached, noting that it would not please the Ukrainian side. Poland’s tough stance on agricultural imports highlighted the continuity in the country’s position between the current government, led by the pro-European Civic Platform, and its predecessor, the Euroskeptic Law and Justice party. This episode brings home the point that EU enlargement could be held hostage by bilateral disputes and, occasionally, by domestic politics in EU members.

The Western Balkans also provide several sobering examples of bilateral woes, setting a difficult precedent for Moldova and Ukraine. North Macedonia’s membership negotiations were blocked by Greece between 2009, when the commission recommended opening the talks, and 2019, when Skopje ratified the Prespa Agreement, which put to rest the name dispute between the two countries. In 2020, North Macedonia’s accession efforts were blocked again by Bulgaria over another dispute to do with history, and the compromise reached in 2022 is yet to be implemented by Skopje. As a result, North Macedonia has officially launched EU membership talks but not yet progressed to their substantive phase. The nationalist VMRO-DPMNE party’s victory in the country’s May 2024 parliamentary election does not augur well for the constitutional changes demanded by the EU.

Now, Albania, which has held only the initial intergovernmental conference with the EU, is being threatened by a Greek veto because of a spat concerning an ethnic Greek mayor-elect, Fredi Beleri, who was convicted for vote buying. It does not take a huge leap of imagination to anticipate Croatia wielding its veto over Serbia’s or Bosnia and Herzegovina’s accession talks because of issues such as the status of the Croat community in Bosnia.

This perennial problem, which has plagued EU enlargement since the 1960s, is well understood. There has been a flurry of proposals by think tanks to abandon voting by unanimity in the interim stages of enlargement and move to qualified majority voting (QMV). Some analysts have suggested that such a move is possible under the EU’s existing legal framework thanks to the so-called passerelle clause, which enables the council to change the bloc’s decisionmaking rules ad hoc and adopt QMV in enlargement and even in foreign and security policy. The need for majority voting in foreign affairs has even percolated into the rhetoric of national leaders: Scholz, for example, made a strong appeal for QMV in 2023. Indeed, Germany has created an informal club of a dozen member states that support the idea.

There are several problems with this solution, however. The first is that even with QMV for decisionmaking on enlargement, individual member states would still be in a position to exercise their national vetoes. Each wave of enlargement requires an accession treaty that must be endorsed and ratified by all twenty-seven EU members, allowing each of them to engage in political arm twisting or even block a new entrant. In such a scenario, a potential spoiler, having been outvoted every step of the way in council decisions to open or close negotiation chapters, would have only greater resolve to use its veto power.

The second problem is that overhaul of the decisionmaking rules in the council cannot be a standalone reform. Thus, to make the union “enlargement ready,” the 2023 French-German nonpaper recommended a series of reforms to the parliament, the commission, and the council. The document’s authors were careful enough to suggest that all of the reforms are possible through votes in the council and without amending the EU’s treaties. That is fully understandable: the experience of the 1990s and 2000s, especially the EU’s failed 2004 Constitutional Treaty, shows that treaty reform is fraught with risks. However, the alternative—integration by stealth—might hamper the union’s legitimacy and generate pushback in individual members. Any perception that European integration is moving forward thanks to behind-closed-doors decisions by Brussels would be manna from heaven for populists and Euroskeptics, who made gains in the 2024 European Parliament elections. Russian propaganda would surely stir the pot, too. Institutional reform may come back to bite its proponents in that it may bring to power elites who are likelier to defy the EU on a range of policies, including enlargement.

Last but not least, all reforms are themselves contingent on unanimity voting in the council. It is not realistic to expect turkeys to vote for Christmas. Why would current or potential naysayers agree to surrender power in the council for the common good? They could seek to trade their vetoes for some sort of financial or political reward from the rest of the EU. However, they would do so on a case-by-case basis, rather than in blanket terms.

On a positive note, clearing the hurdles to enlargement inside the EU would make the process more credible externally. In principle, removing the threat of individual members’ block—at least in the short term—should inject predictability and motivate candidate country governments to meet Brussels’s conditions. Ideally, isolating bilateral disputes from the negotiations would give EU policy a welcome boost. Yet, realistically, the chances of this happening are slim.

Another problem that besets enlargement policy is a lack of impetus from the likely new members themselves. After a decade of negotiations, Serbia has opened only twenty-two out of thirty-three chapters and provisionally closed two. At the time of writing and after twelve years of talks, Montenegro has opened thirty-one chapters and closed only three, hoping that more will follow later this year. By contrast, it took Croatia eight years to complete its negotiations and enter the EU.

The slow pace of the negotiations may be due to the stricter conditions applied to the current crop of candidates than to those in Central and Eastern Europe. Democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland and unfinished rule-of-law reforms in Bulgaria and Romania call for caution. However, the sluggishness of the talks also points to a host of structural challenges in the candidate countries.

State capture and corruption are the most visible issues. Incumbent elites have been reluctant to hand over power to independent judiciaries and regulators, which could upset the elites’ access to power and resources, undercut their clienteles, benefit their political competitors, and even result in jail sentences. The rule-of-law reforms are a potential disruption for these elites, who have a strong incentive to implement them selectively. That is true both of countries that are enthusiastic about membership and of those that lag behind.

State capture feeds into authoritarian practices, as observed in Georgia, Serbia, and other countries. Incumbent elites tilt the playing field in their favor by manipulating elections, influencing or capturing the media, and harassing and, in some cases, even jailing opponents from the political opposition and civil society. Authoritarians have not only subverted but also perverted the rule of law. So-called foreign agent legislation, which requires individuals or entities that receive support from outside the country to register as foreign agents, has proliferated in recent years. On May 28, 2024, the Georgian parliament overrode President Salome Zourabichvili’s veto of a bill known as the Russian law because of its similarity to Russia’s foreign agent legislation, defying mass protests at which activists rallied under EU flags.

Such domestic dynamics are compounded by interference from external spoilers, such as Russia, which has a track record of using state capture to its advantage. Countries like Georgia and Moldova are particularly susceptible to this trend, but elites in the Western Balkans, especially in Serbia and Republika Srpska (an entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina), have a long history of colluding with Moscow. Given that illiberal values and anti-Western rhetoric are also parts of the authoritarian package, the scope for obstructive action is considerable.

In some countries, systemic corruption is part and parcel of ethnic power sharing, a policy promoted by the West since the 1990s as a recipe for resolving conflict. That is clearly the case in North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the governments bring together parties that represent the main communities. But such ethnocracy erodes transparency and the legitimacy of institutions and public policies. The trade-off between peace and good governance—the latter being the EU’s key ask of future members—is easy to observe.

Historically, the EU has used two mechanisms to induce transformation in candidate countries. One is political conditionality, which directly targets government elites and formal institutions by placing requirements on them. The other is indirect influence on civil society and the public sphere more broadly to spur pro-EU momentum from the bottom up.

Political conditionality is the EU’s default mechanism. It was honed as a tool in the context of the union’s 2004–2007 enlargement and continued as the EU prepared to expand to the Western Balkans and, now, Eastern Europe. Short of membership—the ultimate incentive—the EU deploys several carrots: symbolic recognition in the form of candidate country status, additional financial allocations, improved market access through the abolition of tariffs and nontariff barriers, visa-free travel, and inclusion in policies and institutions. In theory, Brussels can use these rewards not only positively but also negatively, for example by rescinding benefits for candidates that regress or by rewarding only some countries to punish the laggards.

At the time of the 2004–2007 enlargement, practitioners and scholars praised the EU’s accession conditionality as a tool for democratization, institutional development, and market reform. But in hindsight, its impact appears mixed. Changes induced by the EU can be partial, and domestic actors can blunt or altogether veto the policies and institutional arrangements promoted by Brussels. Democratic backsliding has furthermore shown that achievements such as the establishment of independent regulators tasked with policing EU rules can be rolled back once a country enters the club. Attempts to institute postaccession conditionality, as with the EU’s Cooperation and Verification Mechanism for Bulgaria and Romania or the more robust rule-of-law regulation adopted in 2020, have not delivered. Hungary managed to unfreeze some of its blocked EU funds by leveraging its support for granting aid to Ukraine. Meanwhile, EU efforts to develop clearer standards and benchmarks in crucial areas, such as overhauling the judiciary and combating corruption, remain a work in progress.

Conditionality works only if there is domestic buy-in—both among elites and at the popular level. Ideally, there should be political forces capable of winning elections or, at least, gaining a plurality of votes based on an EU-oriented reform agenda. These forces should be supported by domestic constituencies that push for European integration and the institutional adjustments it requires, such as the establishment of robust regulatory bodies, judicial reform to contain corruption, and greater transparency in public procurement. Such constituencies should be mobilized between elections to ensure a sufficient level of accountability and pressure governments to honor their EU commitments. In short, Brussels can be successful only if it acts in league with political actors and civil society in the candidate countries. The alternative, as seen in the experience of the 2004–2007 entrants, is a series of Potemkin reforms that are either hollow or easily subverted by special interests.

As for the EU’s second mechanism, the evidence for the existence of bottom-up demand for Europeanization is inconclusive. There are strong pro-EU majorities in some countries. With the exception of Serbia, over 68 percent of citizens in the Western Balkan states said in early 2024 that they would vote in a referendum for their country to join the EU. In Kosovo, the share reached 89 percent; and in Albania, 92 percent. That compares with 78 percent of Ukrainians in a similar poll in late 2023. However, a pro-EU consensus does not necessarily translate into a particular electoral preference. If all parties declare their commitment to the goal of joining the union, the issue loses political salience and other factors or social cleavages determine voters’ electoral choices. Even more significantly, EU orientation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the presence of robust, well-organized, well-resourced, and influential civil society that can hold governments and politicians to account and demand Europeanization.

To be sure, there have been positive examples of pro-EU mobilization. In Ukraine, former president Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an Association Agreement with the union resulted in the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. In North Macedonia, anticorruption protests led to a change of government in early 2017 and, eventually, the unblocking of the country’s NATO membership and the tentative opening of its EU accession negotiations in July 2022. Moldovans elected the pro-Western Maia Sandu as president in November 2020, ousting the Russia-friendly Igor Dodon.

Pro-EU constituencies can take action and make a difference at pivotal moments, such as elections and protests. However, that civic energy can easily fizzle out if a country’s EU aspirations hit a roadblock, as happened in North Macedonia and might also occur in Moldova. Finally, diffuse support for European integration may fail to translate into an institutionalized civil society that is able and motivated to drive more granular policy and institutional reforms and influence elite preferences.

The war in Ukraine has created the false impression that the EU is on the cusp of a big-bang expansion akin to the 2004–2007 accessions of Central and Eastern European states. Over two years since the start of the war, it is clear that familiar political and institutional hurdles—in both the union and the prospective new members—are constraining the pace and impact of enlargement. Although the EU has not lost its power of attraction, particularly in the economic realm, there are no easy wins on the immediate horizon and into the 2030s.

Overhauling the EU’s existing institutions and policies—from voting rules in the council to the allocation of seats in the parliament and from the disbursement of budgetary resources to the structure of the Common Agricultural Policy—makes a lot of sense to render the EU fit for enlargement. Yet, many of these reforms would be difficult if not impossible to achieve. And they are medium-term priorities, rather than pressing concerns.

The EU should therefore pay more attention to its influence over domestic politics and societies in the candidate countries—the core of its transformative impact. To recover some of this influence, the union should not dilute its conditionality with regard to essential democratic guardrails, such as independent judiciaries. Rather, the EU should develop tools to monitor and support other critical areas, like the media and civil society. These domains are included in the EU’s membership criteria, but EU legislation and common standards on them are thin. Member states and the commission should push back against attempts to intimidate advocates of accountability and transparency as well as policies to curb media freedom and pluralism. The EU should be more forthcoming in censuring authoritarian practices, even at the cost of being accused of meddling in states’ internal affairs. Intervention could come in the form of public criticism of authorities or behind-the-scenes pressure when appropriate. More EU funding should be available to civil society organizations, bypassing national authorities.

A more robust stance on democracy will work only if the EU applies and enforces similar standards in its member states. With Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, there is a direct danger that the EU could turn into a launchpad for authoritarian practices, values, and ideas or, conversely, be vulnerable to authoritarian governance imported from outside. Stricter conditionality tied to financial transfers is therefore crucial for making enlargement work externally. Otherwise, the EU will face the unpalatable dilemma of choosing whether to keep semidemocratic countries out or welcome them in.

Such a policy choice is not risk free. A focus on democracy promotion may lead to a backlash and invite more hedging behavior from candidate countries, which may reach out to Russia and, increasingly, China as counterweights to an interventionist EU. In addition, the union could be vulnerable to accusations of duplicity in that disunity among member states and individual countries’ use of vetoes could result in failure to reward reform. And geopolitics could trump conditionality, as illustrated by the cases of Georgia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. As before, EU will therefore have to strike a balance between its principles and its practical concerns. But it is also clear that longer-term enlargement cannot work without a degree of convergence between potential new entrants and the current EU members, however much diversity there is in the latter group. The best way to achieve this convergence is by empowering agents of change in the respective societies, rather than rely fully on formal conditionality, which leaves governments in candidate countries with sufficient wiggle room to renege on commitments made to the EU.

The final point is that the EU should continue to push forward integration with Western Balkan and Eastern European countries in functional areas like energy, the green transition, transportation, migration management, and a plethora of other issues. The EU should promote inclusion and participation in institutions and policies short of membership. Such offers may go hand in hand with increased levels of financial support, for example by bringing countries into the EU’s internal market. But pre-membership must also be tied to a calibrated set of conditions.

The EU does not have a magic wand to transform other countries—unless they already want to be transformed. That is the main lesson of the enlargement waves in the 1990s and 2000s. Yet, the EU could do better in using the political, institutional, and economic leverage it has when dealing with its neighbors.