Fit to burst

The EU's unstoppable enlargement

This week, we got our first real glimpse of the new Europe - the political and diplomatic revolution forced onto the EU and NATO by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its strategic failure. For the second time, the 44-nation European Political Community (EPC) summit convened - on this occasion at Castel Mimi in southeast Moldova - but this time truly on the front foot.

When EPC leaders met in Prague last October, their greatest fears about winter energy blackouts had passed and Kyiv had retaken 12,000 square kilometers of the Kharkiv region. However, Ukraine was still short of critical military equipment and the wholesale gas price was over €160 per megawatt hour. Eight months on and gas is below €25 – its lowest price since October 2021 – and Ukraine is poised to launch a counteroffensive using 700 tanks and 5,500 armoured vehicles supplied by allies.

The German government's u-turn on providing Leopard tanks to Ukraine in January broke the political seal. At Mimi, the Belgian, Dutch, British, Danish, and Swedish heads of government met as an "F-16 coalition" to provide training for Ukrainian pilots in US-made fighter jets while another Polish-led cabal responded swiftly to Ukrainian pleas for an increased supply of Patriot air-defence systems.

Aside from taking practical steps like these and measures to make the EU and its eastern and southern flanks more resilient to Russian and Chinese pressure, the Mimi EPC was as significant in helping reboot thinking in the union's major capitals. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky wasn't the only star turn at the summit. Praise for the Moldovan hosts as a "model" for their resistance to Russian revanchism and reassurance that the former Soviet republic is "at the heart of Europe" weren't just bromides for a change. The EU’s leaders have been forced to face outward, and some are clearly enjoying the view.

Volte face

Take the most remarkable foreign-policy speech from a French head of state for two decades. Since the new century began, successive presidents – Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, and Emmanuel Macron – have opposed EU enlargement and pursued (more or less enthusiastically) a Gaullist policy of equidistance between the western alliance and the eastern great powers.

Once Kharkiv was liberated, Macron had already abandoned his earlier view that Russia should not be humiliated by defeat and turned into a keen advocate of arming Ukraine. He had also retreated from his explicit opposition to enlargement partly in recognition of his growing isolation but also out of fear that rejected eastern applicants would turn instead to Russia, China, and Turkey and the EU would nurture a dozen Hungarys or even Belaruses on its borders. However, Macron’s speech to the Bratislava GLOBSEC 2023 conference the day before the EPC summit was the first full synthesis of France’s revised doctrine.

First, he set out a clear short-term vision for ending the war and it was nothing like the equidistant Indonesian proposal that emerged this weekend from the aptly named Shangri-La Dialogue conference. The role of NATO and the EU, said Macron, should be to maximise the success of the Ukrainian counter-offensive with the hope of forcing Russia to negotiations “in the coming months” and agreeing to a lasting settlement without territorial claims. Fascinatingly, Macron foresees that it is not only Russia that will need to be contained postwar. Ukraine will be “such a powerful actor” and “we have so over-armed our eastern flank” that Kyiv urgently needs incorporation into the EU’s and NATO’s orbit.

Second, the EU – and especially France, its most enlargement-sceptical member – has to own up to its strategic mistakes and bring not just Ukraine but Moldova and six Balkan states in from the cold as quickly as possible. The union could, as it has done before, promise accession and then play for time. “We know how to play this game very well; we have practised it for a long time. If we do that … we will give more space to all those who want to destabilise Europe”. Twenty years ago, Chirac – infuriated by the incoming central and eastern members’ vocal support for the US invasion of Iraq – said they had "missed an opportunity to keep quiet". In Bratislava, his successor apologised to those same states: "Some told you then that you were missing opportunities to keep quiet. I believe we too have sometimes missed opportunities to listen".

With France on board, there is nothing in the way of starting substantive accession negotiations with Ukraine, Moldova, Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Albania from 2024 – a symbolic 20 years since the 10-nation enlargement to the east and coinciding with the inauguration of a new European Commission and the selection of a European Council president. Before they can be confident of joining the six leading applicants, Serbia and Kosovo need to settle their current dispute, while Georgia’s prime minister has to pick a side between Brussels and Moscow. Turkey, the eternal candidate, will remain so – the inevitable exception to Macron’s new candid approach to candidacy.

Needs must

Expansion to as many as nine new members won’t happen without internal changes to reduce veto powers inside the council of ministers. But, while it’s easy for politicians to express their frustration with unanimity in principle, it’s a lot more difficult to surrender the veto in practice. By way of a perfect example, in the wake of the 2007-08 crisis, ten states demanded the introduction of a financial transactions tax (FTT) but were blocked by others who allowed them to create one. A decade on, they’ve been unable to agree and that’s the easy stuff. Imagine being deprived of a veto on a core foreign-policy position. Imagine Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán losing his capacity to extract concessions from one sugar daddy to impose sanctions on another.

Getting the internal changes required to convince the French that a 35-member union can be functional will take years and be vulnerable to ratification risk. At the same time, the Orbán experience has made the core states hesitant about bringing in new members that are insufficiently committed to liberal democratic norms, and the rule of law, and are vulnerable to official-sector corruption. But, as Macron admitted in Bratislava, the genuine prospect of accession for eastern and Balkan applicants can’t wait.

Something’s gotta give, and that something will be the enlargement process. Changes will have to be made that allow for the early delivery of the economic benefits of the European Economic Area (EEA) while phasing in the union’s political aspects. Along these lines, Steven Blockmans, Michael Emerson, Milena Lazarević, and Strahinja Subotić have devised a four-step template for staged accession that reserves 100% funding and full veto powers until phase four. I’m willing to bet the EU will opt for something like this.

This has profound ramifications for the EU’s two voluntary outsiders: the UK and Switzerland. Keir Starmer, the UK’s next prime minister, has taken a lot of flak for publishing an editorial in the eurosceptic Daily Express, restating his view that “Britain’s future is outside the EU. Not in the single market, not in the customs union, not with a return to freedom of movement. Those arguments are in the past, where they belong”.

I have no reason to believe that he or his advisers are doing anything more than strangling a Conservative election attack line at birth. And yes, they do risk demoralising more rejoiners than pacifying a diminishing cohort of “red wall” Labour exiters. But, set against Europe’s political and security reconstruction over the coming decade, the Starmer approach makes sense. Any EU or EEA the UK seeks to rejoin in the future will be much changed from the communities it left.

In inglorious isolation at the end of the last decade, the UK is now one among many satellites orbiting the regulatory superpower that is the EEA. As for the EU, its political, diplomatic and military gravity has been revealed to be much weaker than its economic pull. While France and Germany equivocated over outright support for Ukrainian victory throughout 2022, the UK was a constant and material ally to Kyiv and to the EU’s NATO-prioritising border lobby. After an election in 2024 and behaving as a constructive ally to the EU’s core as well as its border states, the UK will again become a willing satellite economically and a major player in the diplomatic and security field. In this respect, as always, it pays to skip what Starmer rules out and read what he rules in. At the very least, the new government will use the 2025 review of the UK/EU trade and cooperation agreement to strike accords on sanitary and phytosanitary accord and rules of origin, rejoin the Horizon funding programme for research and innovation, and join a new security union.