The EU Must Rise to the Enlargement Challenge
The EU moved forward decisively on enlargement at its December summit. The European Council agreed to open accession talks with Ukraine and Moldova, made Georgia and Bosnia Herzegovina candidate countries (with more restrictions on Bosnia getting to that point). But will the current momentum continue?
There are challenges ahead. A diverse set of candidate countries raises, inevitably, a whole range of issues and questions – firstly, for the candidates’ effective preparation and, secondly, for the EU to readjust as its numbers and diversity of member state increases. The political drive to move forward has come, of course and rightly so, from Russia’s war on Ukraine. But negotiating with a country that for an uncertain period to come will still be at war, and then facing a deep reconstruction path, will not be simple. And the EU had stalled, until these more recent efforts, for two decades on progress to absorb the western Balkan countries with the exception of Croatia and Slovenia.
The wider environment is not auspicious either. Compared to the big bang enlargement of 2004, prepared in the 1990s, the geopolitical situation is deeply troubling from Russia to the Middle East to China. The US presidential election looms. There are fears that the far-right will increase its representation in the European Parliament elections in June. And the climate change challenge requires more urgent and effective action too, as 2023 is declared the world’s warmest year ever.
Reasons for Optimism
Yet, even so, perhaps it is possible to be more positive about the prospects for EU enlargement than some are. The 2004 enlargement may look, in hindsight, as if it was straightforward, strategic and dynamic. But it took 15 years from after the Berlin Wall fell. It involved a lot of muddling through – plus a whole series of new EU treaties (including the Lisbon treaty after the 2004 enlargement).
And while there were some political and policy debates at the time calling for more rapid enlargement or for some type of political membership to be created ahead of the candidates fulfilling all the EU’s acquis, or to consider taking the EU further east (including to Ukraine), there was no such political outcome. It was a political and technical process that moved forward in fits and starts but, in the end, could not but go with the overarching momentum that came from the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Many today, in analysing enlargement, underline the challenges that may arise from bringing in up to nine more member states, express concerns about budget, decision-making, agricultural policy, in particular, and the potential for rule of law backsliding amongst the candidates or the current state of democracy in many of the candidates. These are all serious issues and will need tackling.
But a broader view suggests the EU has, until now, done well with its series of enlargements. Once again today, enlargement looks like the EU’s most effective foreign policy tool – as the EU stumbles over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and worries about a potential Trump victory in the US elections.
The EU has, since the first enlargement in 1973, enlarged from six to twenty-eight member states (then back to twenty-seven with Brexit). That’s almost a five-fold increase. If all the current actual and potential candidates joined, except for Türkiye, the EU would enlarge by a third of its member states.
So, the EU has demonstrated its absorption capacity again and again – and its democratic, political and economic attraction – in previous enlargement rounds. Hungary’s less than democratic government, and Viktor Orbán’s truculent behaviour including threats of future use of vetoes on the enlargement process, are not acceptable. But they should not colour the view of the whole process. Looked at in the round, the EU, over the last decades, brought in and underpinned the new democracies in Greece, Spain and Portugal and subsequently did the same for most of the new member states from central and eastern Europe. The EU adjusted its policies and decision-making including broadening qualified majority voting. And the EU carried on taking decisions, from the euro to climate change to tackling AI challenges, to the current enlargement round.
So, yes, the current enlargement challenges are not small. But the EU has managed negotiations, and policy, political and institutional adjustments before, and it can and will do so again.
Political Drive and Process Must Go Together
There are many relevant lessons from the various enlargements since 1989 that remain relevant today. But the most overarching one – looking at the success of the 1995 and 2004 enlargements and the relative stagnation of accession in the two decades since (apart from Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia) – is that political drive, dynamism and commitment is central. That doesn’t mean there will or should be no political debates – there were plenty in the 1990s. But it means process can only help to drive accession forward if the EU’s leaders stick to the enlargement goal with clear political direction and dynamism.
What we’ve seen in the last two decades is lack of commitment or focus, until the last two years, from the EU’s leaders. And so, while the European Commission has continued with the accession process across the candidate countries, and the European Parliament has contributed both politically and technically, the process stagnated. What we see now is a real political determination from the European Council both with respect to Ukraine and to the wider group of candidates, that it will be vital it maintains – both in the accession process and in supporting Ukraine militarily. The European Parliament can and must play a key role here in ensuring and demanding the enlargement process moves forward – both ensuring political dynamism is maintained in the process and continuing its serious role in analysing and unpicking the technical challenges both for the candidates and for the Union.
Managing the Political and Technical Challenges
There are political and technical challenges ahead, and there will be bumps in the road. While Orbán did not go through with his threat to veto the EU summit decision in December to open accession talks with Ukraine and Moldova (leaving the room instead), he did then veto the EU’s funding for Ukraine. The funding will now be addressed, one more time, at the EU summit on 1st February where the expectation is that either Orbán will back down again or the EU26 will move ahead without him.
After that, the EU will need to agree the negotiating frameworks for Ukraine and Moldova at unanimity in March. Orbán’s spokesman, after the December summit, threatened in a spirit of playground bravado, Hungary could veto all 70 decisions that will occur through the negotiating process to open and close accession chapters. But EU politics does not only work through the rules of voting. It works through compromise, consensus, debate and finding a way through. The EU 26 will not simply sit there if Orbán repeatedly upends the process, not least given Hungary’s rule of law problems. As Politico reported recently, Orbán’s behaviour at the EU summit “has gone in 26 black books and will come back to haunt him … He will be made to pay eventually.”
Driving the EU enlargement process forward is not only about one problematic member state. All EU member states will be engaged with the implications for decision-making, institutional functioning, specific policies – and will have a weather-eye, as always, on their own domestic politics and their power in the EU. None of this will be easy. But not everything has to be done at once.
Whether for free movement or the common agricultural policy or other areas, there is scope to use extended transition periods if needed. In the face of climate change, major reform of agricultural policy is needed (and in part under way already) in any event. The EU has already absorbed over 4 million Ukrainian refugees, in the face of Russia’s war on Ukraine. And the EU has its own demographic and labour supply challenges that enlargement could actually help with as long as the social level-playing field is maintained.
The renewed EU enlargement methodology since 2020 also toughens up how the EU can deal with back-sliding especially in rule of law terms amongst the candidates. And the EU needs, too, to both use more firmly its own tools to deal with rule of law challenges from existing member states, notably Hungary, as well as looking at better, more graduated tools for the future.
Difficult challenges will doubtless exist in the years to come, depending on where and whether Russia still occupies some areas of Ukraine at the time of accession, but northern Cyprus being in the EU but with the acquis suspended shows one possible route. As others have pointed out, some of the budget challenges raised by bringing in new, poorer member states may be alleviated in the case of Ukraine as it will, in future, need much international and EU funding for reconstruction.
Inevitably, as seen in the Franco-German independent experts’ report, questions of more qualified majority voting and of a multi-speed EU have returned into the debate. These are not only concerns due to enlargement. The EU’s failure to agree any summit statement at all on the situation in Gaza in December shows increasing its geopolitical clout is a distant hope – and more QMV would not have solved that problem at the summit. But to ease the ability of any one member state to gum up the works, as Hungary has for now on the budget decision and threatens to do again on enlargement chapters, then some form of increased QMV looks to be the way forward.
Ideas of partial integration by policy area for candidates may yet prove useful for maintaining dynamism (as long as it doesn’t become a ploy for slowing the process down). But the recurring ideas around multi-speed Europe down the last thirty years suggests, when it comes to it, member states do not want to be left out (the UK a notable exception but now in an outer tier of multi-speed Europe pretty much on its own).
It has also been reported by Politico that Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will soon produce a new paper on reforms needed for enlargement – including, potentially, the idea that internal EU reforms will be linked to steps forward in the enlargement negotiations. This sounds like something that could make both accession talks and reforms more complex.
Looking ahead, despite the challenges, the new EU enlargement strategy and political energy is very much to be welcomed. Done successfully, moving the enlargement process forward in the years to come will help to strengthen and dynamise the EU, not the opposite.