The EU Needs to Get Bigger if It Wants to Get Better

In late August, Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, had a message for all the countries waiting to join the European Union: take a number.

The bloc, which has been teasing countries with entry for years, might just be ready for enlargement—perhaps by 2030. “This will be a hard nut to crack,” Michel said, “but there is no way to avoid this debate now.”

Michel wasn’t just giving an update to the eight countries currently in line to join the EU. He was also highlighting that the bloc will need to speed up the painful reforms required in order to support a bigger, if not yet more perfect, union. On the one hand, Brussels needs to make good on promises of accession to countries such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Balkan nations in order to keep its soft power from going limp altogether. On the other hand, what began as a cozy club of six countries has become an unwieldy coven held hostage by outdated rules and unruly leaders.

“The EU cannot function as it is anymore. It’s losing ground when it comes to rule of law, trade, the green transition, and the fight against global climate change. It cannot move forward with a decision-making process where any member state can block anything,” said Zoran Nechev, an associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

The EU’s enlargement project was given a new lease of life when Ukraine and Moldova were granted candidate status in June 2022. But with faith in swift membership dwindling, Brussels’s ability to project its influence to the east and southeast of Europe is being thrown into question.

If Brussels balks again, and keeps candidate countries on hold forever, it would undermine the bloc’s support for Ukraine, weaken European security, and encourage greater malign Russian influence in the Western Balkans, analysts say.

“It would be a very painful decline of what we once knew as a champion of openness, rules-based order, and global cooperation,” Nechev said.

Michel’s cri de poor came more than a month before Brussels started to buy off friends that are already supposed to be on its side. The European Commission, part of the bloc’s executive branch, is set to release about 13 billion euros of EU funds to Hungary, which had been frozen due to concerns over Hungary’s erosion of the rule of law, to avoid Prime Minister Viktor Orban vetoing EU aid for Ukraine; Brussels needs a unanimous vote to fund 50 billion euros in aid.

Before the EU can get bigger, it has to get more nimble. Orban’s Hungary has become an EU spoiler on Russian sanctions, moves that buttress Budapest’s pro-Russian stance. But it’s not just Hungary. In November 2020, Bulgaria blocked North Macedonia from progressing toward EU membership talks over a dispute about history, identity, and language. The dispute was overcome with French help in July 2022, but frustration around Bulgaria being able to veto on ideological grounds still rankles.

Then there is the question of money. Another reform on the agenda deals with cohesion funds—financial aid for the bloc’s poorest regions—as well as agricultural subsidies under the EU’s common agricultural policy. The accession of states like Ukraine, with a population of 43 million, could skew the balance of entitlement and undercut current leading beneficiaries such as Poland.

“We’re in a phase where we have to rethink and reinvent the EU, and this enlargement debate is a sort of euphemism for reform,” said Vessela Tcherneva, the deputy director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

One approach to keeping the enlargement process going while EU reforms take root is a renewed focus on a so-called staged approach, or, as the EU puts it so pithily, Accelerated Integration and Phasing-In. The idea is to integrate candidate members on certain parts of the EU market and EU programs, such as the Erasmus educational program, while other negotiations continue. It might be a tease, but experts such as Tcherneva believe such an approach could make enlargement closer to reality for the Western Balkans.

“From the point of view of Western Balkan societies, they could see some of the benefits of being closer and closer to the EU with more access to EU funds,” she said.

The problem with a phased approach is that the dance never seems to end. The Western Balkan countries have been waiting for years to gain entry to a club that never seems to want them, all the while watching their skilled workers decamp for greener pastures, with Russia waiting to hoover up the remains. In March, the foreign minister of North Macedonia, Bujar Osmani, told his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, that movement on enlargement was the only way to counter Russian influence in the region.

Russia relies on “people’s objective dissatisfaction with the difficult European integration process,” he said. The escalation of tensions between Serbia and Kosovo following the death of four people in northern Kosovo in September was a stark reminder to European allies that a failure to advance enlargement could threaten regional security and create new avenues for Russian meddling. Russia did toy with a coup in Montenegro, is in close cahoots with Serbia, and is playing footsie with bits of Bosnia. Moscow keeps a sharp eye on Bosnia’s Milorad Dodik, the leader of one of the country’s two federal entities, Republika Srpska, who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in May for trade talks.

“Russian influence is one that is invited. It’s very opportunistic; it has been for the last 10 years,” said Spyros Economides, an associate professor in European politics at the London School of Economics. “Putin will take advantage of that, whether it is Montenegro or Serbia. It’s real, and it has sway.”