Since February 2022, a new consensus has been established in Brussels: the European Union must enlarge. EU members once considered skeptical of enlargement now agree that it is time to start thinking seriously about welcoming promising countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Western Balkan States in the club.
This change was prompted by Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Before that, expansion plans were Brussels’ favorite proverbial box, passed from one administration to another as candidate countries such as North Macedonia – an EU candidate since 2005 – jumped through a series of hoops. changing political and legal obstacles. to have the right to access without ever leaving the waiting room.
Nowadays, mentalities have changed. As one European diplomat said: “Enlargement is a reality today, and it was not the case a year and a half ago. »
But Brussels has its own duties to fulfill if political consensus is to become a practical path. “Before we can have a realistic conversation with incoming countries, we need to figure out what an enlarged EU would actually look like – and that’s all we got,” said the diplomat, who asked not to be named. DW. “We know the questions but we don’t really know the answers.”
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However, the conversation has started. Earlier this month, a group of researchers commissioned by France and Germany unveiled a paper full of ideas about how it would work and the path forward toward a broader union. Thu Nguyen, senior policy researcher at the Jacques Delors Center in Berlin, was among them. She told DW that rethinking how the EU makes its decisions could prove very difficult politically.
The official list of EU candidate countries is long: Ukraine, Moldova,AlbaniaMontenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey. Georgia and Kosovo are also considered “potential candidates”.
But even with 27 members, the bloc sometimes struggles to act. Foreign policy is evolving as sanction Russia require unanimous support, meaning negotiations can sometimes take months as member states determine which products to ban or which assets to freeze.
Changes in other policy areas such as migration and asylum require the support of a “qualified majority” of EU members – that is, at least 15 states also representing at least 65% of the bloc’s population. Last week, the limits of this political arithmetic were also highlighted when Germany gave the green light to reforms towards a new regulation on migration crises, but its compatriot Italy was quickly withdrawn and left the deal deadlocked.
Under the current system, Ukraine – with its population of more than 40 million – would become one of the most politically powerful countries in the EU. Meanwhile, each smaller state in the Western Balkans, such as Montenegro – with a population of around 620,000 – or Albania with its approximately 2.7 million people – would add more votes to the mix.
“The more member states there are, the greater the risk of having opponents blocking decisions,” Nguyen said. This could prove even more difficult for politically motivated calls like block EU funds intended for countries accused of violating rule of law standards.
Nguyen and his co-authors therefore suggest abandoning unanimity and recalculating voting shares by qualified majority to ensure that a larger EU still has the “capacity to act”. Controversially, the proposal would also make it harder for major powers France and Germany to block a deal.
But such reforms would require a rewriting of the bloc’s founding laws and require support from member states that lose power in the reshuffle. And, as Nguyen acknowledges, “the current political atmosphere is not very favorable to treaty change.”
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Then there is the question of how to distribute European funds between the deepest economic disparities. Most EU candidates have lower GDP per capita than Bulgaria, the bloc’s poorest current member – and with around a third of Brussels’ current budget devoted to agricultural subsidies, the arrival of the agricultural powerhouse Ukrainian would radically modify the current distribution picture.
Last month, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary announced their intention to impose a unilateral embargo on Ukrainian cereals to protect their own producers from possible price drops. For former European Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan, this shows the rocky road ahead.
“It’s going to take huge institutional changes, huge budgetary changes and political adaptation to the new reality,” Hogan told DW. “Ukraine is a huge country with huge agricultural interests. And the idea that you might overnight be able to solve Ukraine’s problems by becoming a fully integrated member of the agricultural policy of the “European Union will pose a major challenge.”
“Even in my time, many trade issues with Ukraine caused sensitivities,” he added. “Tensions between Ukraine and Europe over agriculture are nothing new, but you can imagine that challenges will lie ahead for European farmers in the context where the Western Balkans and Ukraine and other countries will become part of the family.”
Hogan nevertheless remains hopeful: “I am very much in favor of the expansion of the European Union and the integration into our European fold of countries which otherwise might enter into a different fold that we may not like,” said Hogan. he declared, making a barely veiled speech. allusion to Russian influence.
“Politics is the art of the possible and I hope that the existing member states will do their best and their citizens will do their best to ensure that our neighborhood is in a less tense place.”
The end of an ever closer union?
There are all kinds of little questions about how an enlarged European Union works that also need answers: How many more lawmakers would enter the European Parliament? How many additional official languages would there be in the EU? Could each country keep a dedicated member of the European Commission?
Given the legal and political quagmire that lies ahead, some believe it is time to broaden the definition of the bloc. This week, as European leaders travel to Spain for a third meeting of the European Political Community (EPC)a vision of a broader intergovernmental system is outlined.
The EPC is the brainchild of French President Emmanuel Macron. When he first publicly floated the idea in 2022, Macron said Ukraine’s EU membership could take “decades” and argued for a new group that would “allow democratic European nations” to “find a new space for political and security cooperation”. “.
Today, the EPC is formally nothing more than a chat room, with no established structures, voting rights or treaties. But it is the only forum of its kind bringing together his vast church of 45 guests. It includes all EU countries and candidates, rich countries that stay away from the bloc like Switzerland, Norway and the United Kingdom, and even their political rivals Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russia is not on the guest list.
For Thu Nguyen and his fellow researchers, this looser structure could provide an idea of what could happen if the EU cannot agree on an expansion plan.
They suggest that there could be a core ‘inner circle’ of closely integrated EU countries, then the EU as a whole, then a next tier of ‘associate members’ enjoying certain benefits linked to the EU’s single market. bloc, and an “outer circle” based on the EPC, which, according to Nguyen, “will not include any form of integration with binding European law… but rather cooperation based on geostrategic considerations.”
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But this potential multi-tiered approach could prove unpopular, as some see it creating second-class citizens in the EU club. Ukrainian Prime Minister Dennis Shmyhal recently told Politico that his country was “making every effort to ensure that Ukraine becomes a full member of the European Union.”
The European Commission often emphasizes that accession is a merit-based process with no timetable. Always, European Council President Charles Michel recently said the bloc itself should be ready for enlargement by 2030.
Thu Nguyen also supports an end-of-decade goal – but, when asked if this is realistic, she simply says: “It’s difficult to make a prediction.”
“It’s a very long-term process,” Nguyen said. “We are at the beginning of the discussion and debate.”
Edited by: Ben Knight