Currently, nine countries aspiring to join the EU hold candidate status and are at various stages of the accession process. Seven of them have already opened accession negotiations, the final stage towards joining the Union.
By Vincenzo GENOVESE
Aspiring countries for European Union membership from the Western Balkans have faced years of delays on their path to the EU. Ahead of the big enlargement summit on 4 November, Euronews analyses the reasons why the process has lost momentum in recent years and why some citizens in the Region are now showing hesitation. “Waiting for Godot”, a drama where characters wait for something that never happens, has become Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama’s favourite expression to describe the feeling of some candidate countries towards potential EU membership. “Albania is Estragon, the European Union is Samuel Beckett”, Rama said in June 2022, after an EU-Western Balkans summit.
Currently, nine countries aspiring to join the EU hold candidate status and are at various stages of the accession process. Seven of them have already opened accession negotiations, the final stage towards joining the Union.
However, the process has slowed down in Brussels, at least since the time of the European Commission led by Jean-Claude Juncker. The Western Balkan countries have been pushing forward with the process for years. Albania and Serbia applied for membership in 2009, Montenegro in 2008, while North Macedonia has been waiting since 2004. The process seems to have reached a deadlock, causing frustration among both leaders and citizens of the countries of the Region. Croatia, the last country to join the EU in 2013, waited 10 years from application to final approval, while Romania and Bulgaria negotiated for 12 years. The Western Balkan countries continue to wait, despite efforts to align policies and implement reforms. However, Russia’s war in Ukraine and rapid geopolitical changes have been among the main reasons that have revived the push for enlargement and Brussels’ strategic interest in accepting new members.
Enlargement to the southeast is widely seen as a key foreign policy tool and a strategic priority for the EU as a whole, to the extent that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called it “the reunification of Europe” in her recent State of the Union address. “Today there is a slowdown in the enlargement process, if we compare it with the rhetoric of commitment that we hear from senior EU officials,” Teona Lavrelashvili, a researcher at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, told Euronews.
“Today it is much more difficult to become a member of the EU. Countries have to respect a set of rules, guarantee the rule of law and meet standards that were not so strict before. Geopolitics has also become much more difficult to manage,” she added. To join the EU, each country must meet the Copenhagen criteria, set in 1993, with the European Commission assessing progress and the final decision requiring a unanimous vote of the 27 member states.
FEAR OF MORE VETOS AMONG EU COUNTRIES
Next week, the European Commission will present its 2025 enlargement package, an annual report assessing the progress of candidate countries. This year, the package will also include a “pre-enlargement policy review” on the changes that current member states need to make to welcome young people, sources in Brussels told Euronews. According to Lavrelashvili, current EU countries have concerns about new members, especially on cohesion issues. But according to her, the main fear is that an enlarged EU will move even slower on issues that require unanimity.
“The EU’s institutional architecture is the ‘elephant in the room,’” she said. All 27 member states must agree on decisions in broad areas, including foreign and financial policy. Adding members without reforming the institutional structure means more voices that can use the right of veto. The European Parliament, for example, believes that “the processes of enlargement and European unification must go hand in hand” and that “institutional and financial reforms are necessary to meet the challenges of the current enlargement and to guarantee the EU’s ability to absorb new members,” according to a recent resolution adopted on the issue.
A WAY TO UNLOCK THE PROCESS?
Over the years, one of the ideas to break this deadlock has been to grant new member states membership without veto power. There has currently been no official discussion at EU level about this proposal, three sources in Brussels told Euronews. But Steven Blockmans, from the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), believes that could change in the near future.
“It is undeniable that this would create a differentiation between existing and new members, but it would be temporary,” Blockmans told Euronews. According to him, this solution would facilitate decision-making within the EU and would be legally acceptable, as it would apply to all future candidates equally. “This way there would be no discrimination and no violation of EU law,” he concluded. (Euronews.com)
