The Russian invasion of Ukraine forces the European Union to reconsider the accession of eight candidates and two aspirants. This involves absorbing two monsters. One is Ukraine itself and the other is the Western Balkans. They are poor and turbulent countries, with weak justice systems, corruption and abuse of power, in addition to historical grievances that are difficult to resolve because they involve modifying borders to include some populations and exclude others.
Despite these difficulties, Charles Michel, president of the European Council, believes that the 27 must prepare for an enlargement that should take place in 2030. The expansion will stabilize the most unstable part of Europe and Michel believes that the benefits outweigh the risks with you grow
Left on the sidelines is Turkey, a candidate since 2004, a third monster that has preferred to become an autocracy.
Without Russia's invasion, Ukraine would not be a candidate for membership. But war threatens Europe and Europe needs a territory like Ukraine to protect itself. Integrating Ukraine, however, will be an enormous task. Even if the war ends tomorrow, the country is broken and rebuilding will take decades.
It is an immense territory, the second largest country in Europe after Russia, and sparsely populated. The conflict has aggravated a demographic crisis that is difficult to solve. Ukraine has lost ten million people since 1993 and if things do not change within fifteen years it will lose another ten and will not reach 30 million inhabitants.
Ukraine has shown great resilience against Russia, surpassing the most optimistic of its supporters, but no country comes out ahead when it loses population. The war is taking away, precisely, the generation of professionals who should be at the forefront of reconstruction.
But before rebuilding and before entering the EU, there must be peace. The war, on the other hand, seems to have no end. No army seems capable of achieving its objectives. At the same time, there is no viable plan toward peace. Nothing. And this is tragic for Ukrainians, who see how their country burns and is left without young people. And it is also tragic for the EU, which without an armistice cannot guarantee security in Eastern Europe.
The invitation to Ukraine is a hug more than a key, a comfort more than a gateway.
When the time comes, it will not be easy to incorporate Ukraine either.
Agrarian tensions with Poland, for example, are becoming more serious every day. Ukraine, with an agricultural area larger than all of Italy, needs to export grain, one of its main sources of income, and do so even if its neighbors feel harmed.
It will be very difficult to include Ukraine in the Common Agricultural Policy and protect its agricultural sector without other countries feeling aggrieved.
Before the invasion, furthermore, Ukraine was looking into the abyss of failed states. Oligarchies dominated a state that was eminently corrupt. President Zelenksy, who won the elections promising to clean up and impose the rule of law, did not have enough strength to subdue the oligarchs. Changing the political and economic culture of a country is very difficult and even more so in the middle of a war.
Brussels cannot lower the bar on its democratic demands, but it knows that they can be an obstacle to carrying out essential reforms.
Anything is possible, including Ukraine's military victory and the consolidation of its democracy, but today no one knows when or how it will happen.
President Alexandar Vucic has exhausted Brussels' patience. What he promises has little to do with what he does. In theory he is aligned with EU foreign policy, like any other candidate, but in reality he is a firm ally of Russia. He refuses, for example, to impose the sanctions that the EU has issued.
Vucic has a large media empire, which he uses to radiate a nationalist populism that distances him from the EU and brings him closer to Russia. Now, less than 50% of the population supports accession.
The escape valve to vent the frustration of the 6.6 million Serbs over the poor economic prospects is Kosovo, the autonomous region that became independent thanks to US military aid. On September 24, Serbian forces launched a new attack inside Kosovo territory and if the EU is very clear about one thing, it is that Serbia will not enter until it reaches an agreement with Kosovo.
But Serbia also cannot make peace with Kosovo without upsetting Russia and needs Moscow's gas to move forward.
Gone are the years when collaboration with the criminal court in The Hague to try war criminals in Bosnia-Herzegovina opened the door to the European club for Serbia.
He is a potential candidate, but not official. There are five EU countries that do not recognize it, including Spain. It is not a country per se either. It has borders and a flag, but in reality it is an EU protectorate, which lives thanks to financing from the United States and the EU itself.
Brussels' tight control over security, for example, has not prevented the escalation of tension with Serbia. The Kosovo prime minister is a left-wing nationalist incapable of sensibly managing the Serbian enclave in the north of the country. The situation is explosive, the worst since independence in 2008. The 2013 agreement with Belgrade is a dead letter and Brussels, which was the one who promoted it, appears incapable of stopping the authoritarian drift of the Kosovo government.
The prime minister was elected because he promised to end corruption, another evil endemic to this small country, but the strategy he has chosen clashes with the democratic principles of the EU. He has ordered, for example, the closure of the first private television, he has placed an acolyte in charge of the public television and he proposes to purge the entire judiciary to install judges related to his party. He's biting the hand that feeds him, and it's not a good idea.
Prime Minister Edi Rama raised in a recent meeting of the Balkan countries with Charles Michel, president of the European Council, whether it would not be better to unleash a war of all against all in the Balkans to accelerate the accession process. There is no shortage of reasons in a region that, since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of Yugoslavia, has been taken with a pinch of salt.
Albania has been a victim, in addition to the Brussels bureaucracy, which linked its accession to that of North Macedonia. It didn't matter that he had done his homework and made adequate progress in all the subjects - each applicant must pass 35 - because his fate was subject to that of his neighbor, who, in turn, depended on the approval of Greece and Bulgaria.
Rama and other Balkan leaders protested and the EU apologized late last year. Things seemed like they were going to change, but the negotiations remain where they were. From Brussels they only get good intentions.
The biggest problem in Albania, as in other Balkan states, is corruption and organized crime. Rama admits this and has carried out the most ambitious judicial reform in the entire region. It has not been easy. More than 60% of judges and prosecutors have been expelled from the race due to their ties to mafias or lack of professionalism. This purge, however, has left a justice system that is now overwhelmed. It cannot process the flood of cases on money laundering and fraud of all kinds, and, what is more serious, the bosses of these mafias remain untouchable.
Albania's greatest advantage is that 96% of the population supports entry into the EU and Prime Minister Rama is not only an enthusiast of European construction, but a leader in favor of the integration of the Balkans so that the people and goods can circulate without hindrance.
The war has not happened for a country that signed peace in 1995. The scars remain open and it seems clear that they will not close. The EU admitted its candidacy last year, but negotiations have not started. It would be useless to do so in the absence of a federal authority capable of reaching firm commitments.
Bosnia is an EU protectorate. The high commissioner in Brussels can change laws and dismiss elected officials and officials.
The three communities - Serb, Croat and Bosnian - share, in theory, a rotating presidency, but in practice this institution does not look after the general interest of Bosnia.
Russia supports Serbian secessionists and also Croatian nationalists. Destroying Bosnian unity is hitting the EU.
And the EU protects itself by renouncing the possibility that the federation could, one day, be a functional democracy. He prefers to maintain ethnic stability, the prerogatives of each enclave, rather than developing a common State.
Moldova is a poor and small country, with a population that, until recently, was very pro-Russian. The Kremlin maintains 1,500 soldiers in the secessionist region of Transnistria and could easily have occupied all of Moldova if Ukraine had not prevented it. Now Putin only has the support of 30% of the population.
The government is clearly pro-European, but it has not been easy for it to take sides. In fact, until last spring it did not apply sanctions to Russia. He couldn't do it. Before, it had to diversify gas supplies. Romania and Greece helped him reduce gas dependence on Moscow and now that he feels the encouragement of Brussels, the Chisinau executive is more determined to follow his own path.
The EU admitted Moldova's candidacy last year, along with Ukraine, in order to deny Putin another ally in Europe.
The population has understood that they have more opportunities within the EU than with a pro-Russian government, but the road to Brussels is full of threats. Without the protection of NATO, for example, it cannot guarantee its security, but the Alliance, for the moment, is not sending it the anti-aircraft defenses it needs.
This former Yugoslav republic wanted to call itself simply Macedonia and for years it had a serious dispute with Greece, which has a region with the same name. In the background there was the historical pulse over the paternity of Alexander the Great. The Skopje government agreed to add that its Macedonia was the northern one so that Athens could lift the veto on its entry into the EU.
Once this problem was resolved, a new one arose, raised by Bulgaria, undoubtedly the most pro-Russian country in the European Union. The Sofia government censures that Skopje does not protect the Bulgarian minority. Skopje denies it, but such a small country, with barely two million inhabitants and two very powerful minorities, the Albanians and the Bulgarians, fears that it will come to nothing if it guarantees in the Constitution rights that could give rise to secessionist movements.
A year ago, France managed to get the two sides to reach an agreement, but the situation has not improved. Sofia lifted its veto on North Macedonia's accession, but ethnic tensions are now even worse. The two governments accentuate the nationalist posture and have created “cultural clubs” to disseminate the corresponding historical myths that justify their chauvinism. It now seems impossible that, contrary to what was agreed, Macedonia will modify the Constitution to recognize the Bulgarian minority or that Bulgaria will agree to admit the Macedonian language in its territory.
This small country on the shores of the Adriatic, with one of the most beautiful bays in the world, Kotor, an ancient Venetian city, is a paradise for Russian oligarchs. An economy based on luxury tourism is built on this jewel, capable of attracting large real estate investments without asking too many questions about the origin of the money.
Montenegro has been a candidate for the EU since 2010, but in all these years it has been impossible to achieve independent justice. Judges and police are in the pay of the mafias that extend their tentacles throughout the Balkans and reach Moscow.
Organized crime has made this republic the country with the highest GDP in the Balkans, but it still does not even reach 50% of the average GDP of the EU. Wealth, as Brussels says, is not everything, but for Montenegrins it seems so. Giving up easy money to have to work according to the rules set by the EU is not easy.
The EU could easily absorb such a small country with barely 600,000 inhabitants, but in Podgorica there is no strong government capable of carrying out the reforms that are missing to corral organized crime.
Something similar happens to Montenegro to North Macedonia. The two countries are members of NATO, but it is one thing to enter into a military alliance and another into a union of states with the principles of the EU. Brussels does not lower its demands for a candidate to belong to the Alliance.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia has looked to the West. NATO and the European Union have been legitimate aspirations of its 3.7 million inhabitants, and they still are. More than 80% support admission to both institutions.
Russia nipped this drift in the bud in 2008 by invading Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two regions it still occupies. Despite this, the civic and pro-European movement continued. It was precisely the rapprochement of the Tbilisi government with Brussels in 2013 that led the Kremlin to occupy Donbas.
The Georgian population welcomed with open arms the Russian dissidents who fled Moscow and St. Petersburg starting in February last year. In Tbilisi, however, the government is in the hands of a pro-Russian oligarch determined to cut all ties with the West. It is what the Kremlin wants and the population hates.
Before the end of the year, the EU must decide whether to admit Georgia's candidacy. Doing so will be a boost to a government that has no intention of negotiating, but not doing so means leaving the vast majority of Georgians in the lurch. It is a difficult and crucial decision. Russia can occupy the entire country if its hegemony is threatened, but the European Union, at the same time, must offer Georgians the opportunity for a better life.
Last July, in Vilnius, during the annual NATO summit, Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan said he would lift the veto on Sweden's entry if the European Union admitted Turkey. It was a bluff that confused European diplomats for several days.
Erdogan, however, has not changed. He is an autocrat determined to centralize all power. Turkey is no longer a rule of law and Erdogan continues to walk in the opposite direction to Brussels.
On the one hand, it reaffirms its strategic independence, but on the other it affirms that without Turkey the EU will never be relevant in the world.
What's more, the Turkish economy needs a good understanding with Brussels. Not only for customs but for future investments, in strategic sectors that could be aligned.
Erdogan, therefore, seems to live in a contradiction. He aspires for Turkey to fly alone but needs the EU to keep its economy going. The agreements that he has closed with the monarchies of the Persian Gulf to sell them drones and buy oil from them are not enough.
Erdogan is a tightrope walker. It's not that his power is in danger. He was re-elected in the spring and has Parliament in his favor. What's more, in the municipal elections in March next year it is possible that he will recover Istanbul and Ankara. A court case has been filed against the mayor of Istanbul to send him to prison.
He is on a tightrope because as the war in Ukraine drags on it will be more difficult for him to play both sides. He is a member of NATO but talks to Russia. This relationship, however, is complex. No matter how hard he tries, he does not convince the Kremlin to allow the Russian Black Sea Fleet to allow the export of Ukrainian grain. In Syria, furthermore, they remain on opposite sides.
Erdogan should learn his lesson. His influence is limited. Outside the EU, denying democracy and human rights or, in other words, the accession criteria, he is very alone. NATO, by itself, cannot give it the international projection that the EU guarantees.
Not recognizing the unity of Cyprus and threatening to fill Europe with refugees are weapons that Ankara uses to strain the relationship with Brussels, but they no longer have any effect. The EU has shown that it is capable of remaining united and faithful to its principles even in the face of the worst adversity, such as the war in Ukraine.
Erdogan is right that Europe would be much better with Türkiye. The new political, economic and security architecture that the continent needs would benefit from a democratic Turkey, tolerant of minorities and respectful of human rights, but Erdogan prefers to walk alone to find his place in history.
