Reframing enlargement: Patron–Client Relations and EU’s geopolitical transformations

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine returned enlargement to the centre of European political debate, transforming the political conditions within which established frameworks of enlargement studies were developed. Accession remains formally organised as a merit-based, rule-governed process, yet its outcomes increasingly follow strategic valuation, discretionary recognition, and political bargaining. This article introduces International Patron – Client Relations (PCR) as a bounded, middle-range framework for interpreting contemporary enlargement, advancing the relational approach in enlargement studies. PCR conceptualises accession as a relationship organised around cooperative resource exchange, asymmetric power dependence, diffuse obligation, and durability, operating at the level of the individual EU – candidate dyad. The framework occupies the middle ground between conditionality scholarship, which foregrounds incentive structures and compliance, and stronger relational ontologies, retaining strategically oriented actors while embedding their calculations in a structure of persistent asymmetry. Viewed through the lens of PCR, selective acceleration without institutional closure, strategic tolerance of democratic backsliding, differentiated treatment across candidates, and prolonged liminality arise as patterned outcomes of an accession relationship rather than anomalies of a rule-bound process. Therefore, the condition most frequently diagnosed as the crisis of enlargement emerges as its current equilibrium.