19 February 2024

Chatham House's Kundnani: Ukraine means enlargement is again the EU’s priority – but not for the reasons it claims

The European Union is using an old tool for a new purpose as it looks to its defence. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed all that. Enlargement is now not just back on the EU’s agenda but has become its highest priority.

Enlargement is back. For the last decade or so, the European Union had made it clear that, while accession negotiations with several countries would continue, it did not expect any of them to actually join the bloc any time soon. 

After becoming European Commission president in 2014, Jean-Claude Juncker said that no further enlargement would take place during his five-year term. Although his successor, Ursula von der Leyen, promised a ‘geopolitical’ Commission when she took over in 2019, she did not immediately signal a greater openness to enlargement.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed all that. Enlargement is now not just back on the EU’s agenda but has become its highest priority. 

At the Munich Security Conference last week, von der Leyen said, as she has before, that Ukraine and the Western Balkans ‘belong to the European family.’ Indeed European diplomats and think tankers are now frantically debating not just enlargement itself, but how to reform the EU to make it possible for it to ‘absorb’ several new member states. 

 

 

Whereas central and eastern European countries want the EU to accelerate the accession process, especially for Ukraine itself, others worry that enlargement without reform would make the EU dysfunctional – or even more so.

Confusion about a ‘geopolitical Europe’

Enlargement is now often framed as a ‘geopolitical imperative’ or a ‘geopolitical necessity’. The suggestion is that by integrating Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion, the EU would demonstrate that it has now become ‘geopolitical’, as von der Leyen promised it would. 

What is odd about this, however, is that enlargement is the EU’s oldest foreign policy tool. In fact, enlargement was its substitute for a foreign policy at a time when, we are told, it was not geopolitical. In other words, the EU is using an old tool for a new purpose.

These debates illustrate the deep confusion about the idea of a ‘geopolitical Europe’. While the term ‘geopolitics’ has become ubiquitous in foreign policy debates during the last decade, few who use it seem to have reflected on what it means or what the implications of using the term are. 

Sometimes it is used as a straightforward synonym for international politics. But more often it is meant to signify something stronger, whether that is an emphasis on military power or a realist approach to foreign policy.

Chatham House

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