Enlargement remains the most powerful foreign policy tool at the EU’s disposal. But it is likely to remain dysfunctional irrespective of what European leaders decide next week.
EU enlargement is en vogue again.
Days away from the December 14–15 European Council, suspense is building up over whether the EU’s top brass will give a go-ahead to starting EU membership talks with Ukraine. Moldova, which, like its eastern neighbor received candidate status in June 2022, is similarly hopeful that negotiations are within reach.
Bechev is a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, where he focuses on EU enlargement, the Western Balkans, and Eastern Europe.
In the Balkans, Bosnia and Herzegovina hopes to jump on this bandwagon, too—and some member states are arguing its case. Speaking to the FT in November, Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg warned the EU not to forget the Western Balkans, while looking at the region “with a magnifying glass” and at Ukraine with “rose-tinted glasses.”
To be fair, there are reasons to worry that the EU has not overcome its proverbial myopia when it comes to geopolitics. Yes, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has awakened policymakers in Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, reminding them of the strategic value of enlargement. After all, the union has few other political tools at its disposal to respond to security challenges on its periphery. It possesses no standing army or intelligence capability. Member states have been providing military assistance to Ukraine, but collectively they have not done a stellar job, to put it mildly, in scaling up ammunition production to supply the frontlines and refill national stocks.
Enlargement—or member-state building, to use a fashionable term from the mid-2000s—remains the most potent instrument the twenty-seven-strong bloc has at its disposal. However, enlargement policy is also dysfunctional and is likely to remain so irrespective of what the European Council decides next week.
As I have argued in the past, enlargement suffers from both a supply and a demand deficit. On the supply side, member states and their governments have not been keen to pursue it for fear that it will generate costs in addition to benefits—be that domestic pushback, diminished influence over Brussels institutions, less money from the EU budget, or other drawbacks.
Arguably, Russia’s aggression has changed the calculus and these days, even enlargement-skeptics like France are more favorably disposed to the idea of opening the union’s door. Yet there are the blockers, too...
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