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As the EU prepares for its next expansion, it needs to update the Copenhagen criteria that candidate countries must meet to join the union. One pillar of the criteria relates to democracy requirements, and these are in particular need of revision if the EU’s revived enlargement process is to fulfill its potential in incentivizing political reforms.
In particular, the EU needs a wider approach to supporting democracy in the candidate countries that goes beyond the existing accession criteria. These existing criteria are highly formal and institutional, while good-quality democracy requires a more organically rooted process of reform with many features that are not quantified in the current criteria. Widening the EU’s entry conditions would allow them to play a more effective role in the union’s resurrected enlargement project.
There is widespread agreement that the EU enlargement process needs to change as the union advances in its preaccession preparations with the current candidate states. Indeed, this is now the ritually repeated assertion heard from policymakers and analysts alike. This need is due both to the era’s sharper geopolitical tensions and to enlargement’s more general atrophy in recent years. Few would disagree with the widely shared conviction that Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which has revived the EU’s enthusiasm for expansion, also invites a commitment to a fundamentally different form of enlargement.
And yet, as the EU is set formally to open accession negotiations with Moldova and Ukraine in June 2024 two years after granting them candidate status, the enlargement process remains largely unchanged. The need to adapt the preaccession process applies to many policy areas related to enlargement, and analysts and policymakers have offered many suggestions of how to do so. Most of these revolve around speeding up candidates’ de facto inclusion in EU policies, introducing forms of staged accession, and incorporating security issues into enlargement. Some advocate a target date for the candidates’ membership in parallel with internal EU reforms to help make accession succeed. Others call for more differentiated integration based on distinct tiers and concentric circles.
One question that has received less attention relates to the role of the Copenhagen criteria in applicant states’ democratization. The criteria were established during the 1993 European Council summit in Copenhagen and consist of three main conditions that a country has to meet to join the EU. Political criteria stipulate that a state must guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and the protection of minorities through stable institutions. Economic criteria require a country to have a functioning market economy and be able to cope with competitive pressures and market forces within the EU. And legislative conditions stipulate that a country must be able to adopt and implement the EU’s acquis, or body of law and policies.
Thirty years since the Copenhagen criteria were introduced, political dynamics and knowledge about democratization have evolved considerably. Three decades of experience and lessons in where the EU has succeeded and failed in spurring democratization can help sharpen the union’s political conditionality. The EU needs to update the criteria if it is to develop a democracy support policy that is more balanced, more comprehensive, and more in tune with current geopolitical imperatives....
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