FT: ‘It’s now or never.’ Is the EU serious about letting in new members?

Photo: FT

For 13 years, the club of European Union nations has admitted no new members — and amid geopolitical instability and great-power competition, pressure is growing to open the gates again. Yet despite its desperation to project a sense of collective security and purpose in the face of Donald Trump’s provocations, Brussels is nonetheless wracked by uncertainty over potential expansion, Financial Times notes.

As leaders of candidate countries demand faster progress in their membership bids, under pressure from impatient and restless voters, the EU’s existing heads of government fret that the bloc’s structure, and their own sceptical voters, are not able to handle fresh blood.

The geopolitical chaos “created a pressure moment to think seriously about what Europe is, and make a credible beneficial offer to aspiring members”, says Ilir Deda, an analyst at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

“The EU’s offer of peace, stability and opportunity is unmatchable,” said Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa in a joint statement. “Enlargement is a strategic choice.”

Yet would-be entrants are beginning to wonder whether the EU’s leaders are talking up an empty promise.

Many candidate countries are already avoiding unpopular or uncomfortable reforms because they don’t trust Brussels’ promises of rewards, while Brussels berates them for failing to pass necessary legislation.

Yet there is a growing sense that the EU needs to show that it is serious about letting in new members. “It’s now or never,” says Deda. A failure to act would have a “catastrophic impact, not only for [candidate countries], but for the EU too. The credibility of the EU will be hurt internally and globally. That scenario must be avoided at all costs.”

The so-called Big Bang expansion of 2004, when 10 new members including Poland and Hungary joined the EU, marked the bloc’s shift from an inward-looking western European core to a post-cold war future of eastern expansion.

Yet in the decade after Croatia’s entry in 2013, membership shrank — with the departure of the UK — rather than grew. The European Commission’s then-president Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014 declared Brussels would “take a break from enlargement” to digest the integration of its newest recruits.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in Ukraine, whose armed forces are among Europe’s largest, best-armed and certainly most battle-hardened. EU member states want Kyiv and its formidable military on their team, not angrily sulking on the periphery.

But those benefits come with a colossal flip side. EU officials admit that the scale of concerns over corruption, judicial independence and other fundamental bloc values means the country would not have been granted a formal accession process without Russia’s invasion.

That contradiction, and Kyiv’s demand for a “fast-track” entry next year as part of a possible peace deal with Russia, have forced Brussels to seriously think whether a new approach to enlargement might be necessary to meet the new political realities.

A stated goal of accession by January 1 2027 was a “cry for help”, says a senior EU official involved in the negotiations with Kyiv. “Zelenskyy knew it was impossible. But he needed to send an unambiguous signal to us, and also to Ukrainian citizens, that business as usual on accession would not cut it.”

A senior EU diplomat says Ukraine presents a complex dilemma. “You can’t bring a country of 40mn people that’s at 104 on the global corruption list into the EU. It would make a mockery of the entire project,” the person says. “But you also can’t leave them twisting in the wind. Everyone can see that Ukraine will need something from us to make [a long wait for full membership] easier to swallow.”

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