Last August, Charles Michel, president of the European Council, which groups EU national leaders, said the bloc should be ready to expand to the east by 2030. Even at the time, it sounded optimistic. José Manuel Barroso, who led the European Commission from 2004 to 2014, called Michel’s proposal “aspirational” — a euphemism for too ambitious.
Subsequent events in several applicant countries, notably Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia, lend weight to Barroso’s assessment. They illustrate that the obstacles to enlargement go beyond the challenge of redesigning the EU’s institutions and financial arrangements to make it possible. Far from fulfilling the membership criteria, some states display political trends that point in the other direction.
In the Balkans, the queue for entry includes Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine are also candidates, as is Turkey — at least in theory. The EU correctly judges that the threats to European security, encapsulated in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, make enlargement desirable and even necessary.