Brussels has a way of announcing ambition and quietly attaching the conditions. The European Commission’s new pre-enlargement strategy, presented on October 6 and seen in draft form by RFE/RL, is a case in point. It sets out how a bigger Union might work, and it will get its first airing when EU leaders meet in Brussels on October 15 and 16.
The paper’s central argument is that enlargement is not only about readying candidates. In the Commission’s words, it is equally about preparing the Union to welcome new members while strengthening its capacity to deliver.
Membership with strings
The most contentious ideas would give newcomers a diluted form of membership. It would seem to reflect nervousness in some capitals about taking in poorer, less prepared countries. Diplomats have privately spoken of the need to “avoid another Hungary”, a nod to the rule-of-law problems that dogged Budapest under Viktor Orban.
The strategy never names them, but it is written with four front-runners in mind: Albania, Moldova, Montenegro and Ukraine. Montenegro still hopes to be the 28th member by 2028, and the other three expect to follow soon after.
Among the new proposals, newcomers would agree for a limited period not to oppose Council decisions that require unanimity. In practice that means no veto on most foreign-policy questions, sanctions on Russia included. The period could run as long as 15 years. They could also commit not to block an existing consensus in the European Council, including on later enlargements. The worry behind that clause is familiar. Slovenia held up Croatia’s entry by almost a year over border disputes, and Croatia is now slowing Montenegro’s talks by blocking the closure of several key chapters.
A second proposal, which sat alone in brackets in the text for a long time because the Commission had not settled it internally, concerns legal safeguards. These act as a probationary system in areas such as the economy, the internal market and home affairs, and let a backsliding member be suspended from parts of cooperation. They normally last three years. The Commission wants them to run for up to 10.
The third is a temporary institutional safeguard clause for a particularly serious breach of EU values, allowing specified rights, voting rights in the Council among them, to be suspended. It resembles the Article 7 procedure, which was used against Hungary and Poland without either losing its vote, since each shielded the other and stripping a vote requires consensus. Under the new proposal, a qualified majority would be enough to remove a newcomer’s vote for a time. Existing members would be exempt, so backsliding by an older member would remain harder to punish.
Old debates, some progress
Most of the 16 pages cover classic Brussels material. The Commission again argues that more decisions, foreign policy in particular, should move from unanimity to qualified majority voting, meaning 55 percent of member states representing at least 65 percent of the EU population. The paper concedes the obvious snag: that change itself needs unanimity.
Integration by degrees is already happening. Moldova and Ukraine are in the “Roam Like at Home” mobile data scheme, and the non-EU Western Balkan countries are on track to join. Several hopefuls have also recently joined the Single Euro Payments Area or soon will.
