A geopolitical turn to EU enlargement, or another postponement? An introduction

ABSTRACT

This article, which introduces a Special Issue of the JCES on the challenges of EU enlargement policy towards the Western Balkans, critically examines the geopolitical turn of the EU’s institutional thinking on enlargement since 2017. After several high-ranked EU officials and leaders of member states more or less explicitly voiced their concerns about the declining influence of the EU in the Western Balkans, the European Commission – which has traditionally been responsible for carrying out administrative-technical aspects of the accession process – adopted a more geopolitical approach to enlargement policy in February 2018, and has since sought to advance Western Balkan accession more decisively. However, this geopolitical turn to the EU’s institutional thinking on enlargement has so far failed to translate discourse into concrete results. The article argues that the main reasons for this failure can be found in a lack of support by EU members, which either do not share the Commission’s sense of urgency, or are eager to use enlargement policy and the accession process to advance their national interests. The article concludes with a brief presentation of the structure of the special issue and introduces the contributing articles.

KEYWORDS:

• EU enlargement
• Western Balkans
• European Commission
• European Council

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Notes

1. Or as he put later more precisely before the EU ‘renovat[es] the house … and put things in the right order’ (Momtaz and Gray 2019).

2. ‘The date we are indicating, 2025 is an indication not a promise. We have to know that in the old Europe, the western part of Europe but not only there, there is a kind of enlargement fatigue and this is obviously the case as far as Serbia and Montenegro are concerned’ (Juncker 2018).

3. For the influence of external actors in the Western Balkans see (Bieber and Tzifakis 2019a, 2019b; Markovic Khaze and Wang 2021; Panagiotou 2021; Koppa 2021).

4. EU enlargement was hardly mentioned as an issue in the campaigns for the last European Parliament election of May 2019.

5. For the full text of the French non-paper, see ‘Non-Paper. Reforming the European Union accession process’, November 2019, https://images.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Enlargement-nonpaper.pdf .

6. Still, on Albania’s case, the Council conditioned the convention of the first Intergovernmental Conference on the attainment of further progress in the fields of electoral reform, justice reform and the fight against organized crime and corruption (Council of the European Union 2020, 5).

7. The reasons for Bulgaria’s veto on the opening of accession talks with North Macedonia are discussed in Petrovic and Wilson (2021).

8. In both cases this is longer than any candidate country (excluding Turkey whose accession negotiations have effectively been frozen since the early 2010s) had in any of the previous EU enlargement rounds (Petrovic 2017; Nugent 2004).

9. Here should also be noted that authoritarian trends have been a global phenomenon since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 2008/09. Many advanced democracies in the world and Europe in particular have experienced the emergence of numerous populist and pro-authoritarian political groups and parties and the democracy rankings of the two former frontrunners in post-communist democratisation – Hungary and Poland (in that order) – dramatically dropped over the last ten years (Csaky 2020). The Journal of Democracy devoted two of its issues in 2015 to this topic (2015a, 2015b), and the Journal of Contemporary European Studies in 2018 published a special issue on democratic decline in Hungary and Poland (2018). The last five issues of Freedom House’s Nations in Transit and Freedom in the World publications (issued from 2018 to 2020) were titled: ‘Confronting Illiberalism’, Democracy in Crisis’, ‘Democracy in Retreat’, ‘Dropping the Democratic Façade’ and ‘A Leaderless Struggle for Democracy’.