European Union Enlargement and Geopolitical Power in the Face of War

When faced with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Ukraine's steadfast resistance, the European Union (EU) reacted with remarkable speed and innovation. In a few short months, it offered novel forms of financial and military support to Ukraine, along with the revival of EU enlargement and the recognition of Ukraine as a credible future EU candidate. 1 Two years later, in June 2024, the EU opened membership negotiations with Ukraine. This marked a tremendous change of fortune for Ukraine's long, deeply held and hard-fought aspirations to join the EU. But this change came at the price of a brutal, devastating, full-scale war with Russia. Still, for Ukrainians, whilst US and European military and financial assistance are both essential for prosecuting the war, it is the EU that symbolizes, even embodies, the values and goals that they are fighting for (Hrushetskyi, 2023; Onuch, 2024; Popova and Shevel, 2023; Reznik, 2022). 2 In responding to the war, the EU has shown both its promise as a geopolitical actor and its severe limitations. It has set the stage for the revival of EU enlargement as an important pillar of its ability to promote EU values, project geopolitical power and build its economic wealth (Michel, 2024; Vachudova, 2005). We argue that linking Ukraine's enlargement prospects, its ability to fight off the Russian invasion and the EU's future as a geopolitical actor has opened a new chapter in European integration. However, after impressive co-operation in 2022, EU leaders pulled back in 2023 and have been unable to meet the demands of the war by increasing defence capacities and reforming decision-making in the areas of enlargement and security (Börzel, 2023; Raik et al. , 2023). The EU's sudden recognition of Ukraine as a future candidate reflected the EU's prior experiences of using enlargement as a foreign policy tool (Vachudova, 2014). In this article, we first unpack the dynamics of the EU's ambitious post-communist enlargements and explore how they are shaping the war-triggered revival of the enlargement process for Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, as well as for longstanding candidates in the Western Balkans. For the third time, it is an external shock – and, for the second time, war – that is spurring enlargement. We show that enlargement is once again coming into conflict with EU producers and challenging the EU to manage short-term economic interests in pursuit of its long-term security (Rabinovych and Pintsch, 2024). The EU is also confronted by the imperative of defending liberal democracy and the rule of law amongst its existing members and candidates. Second, we show that whilst the EU's initial response to the war was driven by crisis leadership on the part of the European Commission, the limitations of this crisis leadership, the absence of Franco–German leadership and a shift towards ad hoc member state coalitions have hobbled the EU's response in 2023 and in 2024. For the EU, the collapse of communist rule across East Central Europe caused an 'enlargement shock' (Vachudova, 2007). The EU had developed since World War II in a divided Europe where the Iron Curtain made Central and Eastern Europe all but invisible to Brussels. Suddenly, there was potentially a very long queue of post-communist states that were incontestably in Europe and could not be turned away for reasons of geography. Whilst some opposition leaders called for joining the EU before the communist regimes had even fallen, it took years for the EU to respond by putting a full-scale enlargement process in place. Some EU leaders rejected, and many stalled giving post-communist neighbours what they wanted: the prospect of joining the EU (Vachudova, 2005). As they do today, some EU leaders tried to keep these newly democratizing states at bay; famously, French President François Mitterrand advocated for a 'European Confederation' that would have relegated Central and East European States to an outer circle with lower status than the EU core (Bozo, 2008). The way that the EU had developed since the 1950s made it invaluable for small and weak states to be on the inside, not the outside, of the EU's highly protectionist common internal market. In tandem, it would be very advantageous for small and weak states to gain a seat at the EU table and be protected by the rules that regulate behaviour amongst EU member states. For aspiring members, the economic and geopolitical benefits of gaining EU membership were and are tremendous. And for the EU, an enlarged membership promised a greater geopolitical role on the world stage, economic opportunities in a larger internal market and stable states along its eastern borders (Michel, 2024; Vachudova, 2005). In the early 1990s, however, the EU acted to protect its producers, not to support stability and democracy in neighbouring states. The European Commission negotiated ungenerous initial trade agreements, the so-called 'Europe Agreements', that required the EU's democratizing neighbours to open completely their markets to EU goods but did not reciprocate in precisely those areas where post-communist states could hope to compete: agriculture, chemicals, steel and textiles. In 2023 and 2024, we see EU institutions trying to help Ukraine's war-torn economy with access to EU markets, but once again, there is strong pressure to protect EU producers in key sectors. By the late 1990s, what had been separate – enlargement and foreign policy – was brought together as leaders realized that the EU's most effective foreign policy tool was indeed enlargement (Vachudova, 2005). As negotiations progressed with 10 post-communist candidates, EU leaders were bullish, riding high from the success of completing the internal market in 1992 and other leaps forward in integration during the 1990s. The EU pledged to use the power of enlargement to transform the Western Balkans, opening a new chapter after a shameful decade of failure in the region. Western Balkan states were offered a membership perspective for the first time in Sarajevo in 1999 as part of the stability pact for South-Eastern Europe, followed by access to the internal market and membership negotiations. Yet after Croatia joined in 2013, the enlargement process all but ended for a decade. What are the dynamics of EU enlargement today in the face of Russia's war? There are four points. First, the benefits of EU membership that give the EU passive leverage – and, potentially, tremendous active leverage over candidate states (Vachudova, 2005) – have remained strong despite the ebbs and flows of European integration in the face of the crises that have challenged European politics since 2008. The disastrous consequences of Brexit for the United Kingdom have driven home the economic benefits of EU membership (Epstein, 2019), a point well received even by the EU's far-right parties that have all but stopped advocating for an EU exit. Whilst the EU has become more adept at granting access to the internal market in pursuit of foreign policy goals, the economic benefits of joining the EU's internal market are still enormous (Meunier and Vachudova, 2018), and, for Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, the geopolitical benefits are even greater. Second, enlargement and the EU's geopolitical power continue to be spurred by external shocks. In 1999 and 2022, the EU reached for enlargement in response to the war in its neighbourhood. In both cases, the EU granted struggling countries recognition as credible candidates for membership. And in both cases, the membership perspective came after grave missteps by the EU – in clinging to negotiations with Serbian leaders to end the war in Bosnia from 1991 to 1994 and in profiting from the flow of cheap energy from the Kremlin even after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine by Russia in 2014. Third, whilst EU enlargement is now heralded widely as the EU's most powerful foreign policy tool (European Parliament, 2022), it still harbours weaknesses stemming from the longtime primary function of EU institutions as architects and caretakers of the internal market (Meunier and Vachudova, 2018). EU enlargement helps promote democratic reforms because the benefits of membership create incentives for ruling elites in candidate states to adopt and implement the rules and regulations in force amongst EU member states – the acquis communautaire (see Sedelmeier, 2011). Although stipulated in broad terms in EU treaties, member states have agreed on a little more specific 'acquis' on liberal democracy, including the rule of law and democratic representation, for candidates to adopt. As EU integration is often deepened through crises (Laffan, 2023), it is possible that the trifecta of rising far-right parties across Europe, authoritarian rule in Hungary and military aggression by Russia will spur change in developing this missing 'democracy acquis'. Fourth, there are now strong forces that may overcome the roadblocks that immobilized EU enlargement for Western Balkan candidates in the 2010s. On the side of the EU, disinterest, petty regional politics and a preference for stability at any cost destroyed the effectiveness of conditionality, and the meritocracy of the process was extinguished (Džankić et al. , 2019). On the side of the candidates, whilst all Western Balkan governments continue to pay lip service to joining the EU, some have been captured by domestic elites that benefit from the status quo (Bieber, 2020) and that seek closer ties to Russia and China (Zeneli, 2020). For both sides, Ukraine as an EU candidate may be a game changer (Džankić et al. , 2023). For the EU, there are now compelling geopolitical reasons to end regional political games and revive a meritocratic process. For the candidates, Ukraine's resolve to break the non-enlargement status quo may be invigorating. Once Ukraine seemed to survive the first few days of the invasion, it applied for EU membership on 28 February 2022. In this dramatic move, Ukraine explicitly linked its struggle to survive to becoming an EU member. The initial reactions of EU leaders were reserved, aiming to decouple discussions of future membership from the emergency of the war (RFI, 2022). But in less than a month, EU leaders accepted the logic of the interconnectedness of Ukraine's enlargement prospects, its ability to fight off the Russian invasion and the EU's future as a security actor. For EU leaders and EU institutions, this decision was taken at lightning speed and made crystal clear the strong geopolitical implications of enlargement, hidden in plain sight for years. Indeed, the states whose presidents signed a letter in favour of Ukraine's swift candidacy in February 2022 (Oficjalna strona, 2022) also provided the greatest amount of aid to Ukraine as a percentage of their GDP during the first year of Russia's full-scale war. 3 Meanwhile, the most pronounced sceptics of Ukraine's EU perspective have vocally supported ending the war on Russian terms, as evinced by Hungary and, more recently, by Slovakia (Pollet, 2024; see Haughton et al. , 2024). Has Russia's full-scale war on Ukraine led to deeper European integration? Scholars have argued that the EU has the potential to become a powerful geopolitical actor, even a superpower, if member states decide to strengthen supranational decision-making in foreign policy and defence (Meunier and Vachudova, 2018). In this way, they could build on the EU's undisputed power in trade, where member states have transferred competencies to EU institutions and abandoned the need for unanimity in the Council. Scholars have also pointed to the crisis as a frequent driver of breakthroughs in European integration (Jones et al. , 2021). In the first months of the war, as EU leaders implemented significant and unprecedented measures in the areas of enlargement and security, some scholars expressed optimism about the EU's growing power (Håkansson, 2024; Laffan, 2023; Orenstein, 2023). Two years on, others have observed that the war has so far not empowered EU institutions in a durable way, strengthening instead intergovernmental decision-making – in contrast, for instance, with the effects of the COVID crisis (Anghel and Jones, 2023; Börzel, 2023; Genschel et al. , 2023). Moreover, the war has so far not changed the nature of enlargement policy, leaving the commitment to enlargement questionable (Anghel and Džankić, 2023). We turn now to three dynamics that have challenged the EU's enlargement and security agenda in the face of war: the limitations of crisis leadership by the EU's supranational institutions, the absence of Franco–German leadership and the prevalence of ad hoc member state coalitions. Supranational theories of European integration suggest that in times of crisis, the EU's supranational institutions assume new responsibilities for themselves through agenda-setting and political and institutional spillover (Leuffen et al. , 2022, pp. 98–100). Since 2022, the European Commission, under the leadership of President von der Leyen, has significantly expanded its geopolitical influence and aspirations (Håkansson, 2024). The Commission's role in the enlargement agenda, in military support for Ukraine and in developing the EU's internal defence capacity increased dramatically and helped push through important decisions, often in co-operation with the European External Action Service (EEAS). During the first days of Russia's attack on Ukraine, in March 2022, the Commission played a critical role in implementing the first packages of sanctions (that totalled 13 packages by spring 2024), introducing the Temporary Protection Directive for Ukrainian refugees and repurposing the European Peace Facility (EPF) to aid Ukraine's military effort – the first time that the EU would finance and purchase weapons for a country under attack. In April, the Commission ensured the swift exchange of enlargement questionnaires, thus greatly contributing to the rapid conferral of Ukraine's candidate status. In May, the Commission announced the removal of quotas for Ukrainian agricultural exports and plans to decrease dependency on Russian fuel (REPowerEU). In June, the Commission announced Solidarity Lanes, and in July, it proposed a €50 million European Defence Industry Reinforcement through Common Procurement Act (EDIRPA) initiative. These 2022 initiatives illustrate how the Commission hit the ground running after the start of the war and expanded its remit into new areas. In 2023, the Commission crafted or contributed to several additional long-term initiatives. Most importantly, in November, the Commission presented its latest Negotiation Package (European Commission, 2023) that recommended opening negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova, granting candidate status to Georgia and delaying negotiations with Bosnia and Herzegovina. In April, the Commission renewed quotas and tariff-free trade with Ukraine to support its war-ridden economy, and in July, it prepared the Ukraine Facility, a 50 billion multiyear financial support programme. In the security realm, the Commission crafted a project of munition procurement for Ukraine via the Act in Support of Ammunition Production. Throughout 2023, it prepared the first-ever European Defence Industry Strategy (EDIS) to bolster the EU's fragmented defence industry through joint localized procurement, complemented with the draft of the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) (European Commission, 2024; see Fiott, 2023). Nevertheless, over the course of 2023, the leadership and initiative of the Commission and its ambitious President gradually diminished because the Commission's new crisis-driven competencies that allowed for innovation and deepening integration were not institutionalized. Thus, whilst the Commission could develop and push initiatives in enlargement policy, sanctions policy, energy policy and even foreign and security policy, their acceptance and final shape relied on unanimity amongst the member states in the Council. Whilst the Council increased the EPF financial ceiling in March and June 2023, and then again in March 2024 to help Ukraine, it was in the Council that Hungary managed to block some EPF payments. Moreover, instead of extending the Commission's mandate, in 2023 and 2024, the Council sabotaged even some of the initiatives that were within the Commission's traditional competences. Farmers in France and in states neighbouring Ukraine (Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) mobilized against quota and tariff-free imports of agricultural goods from Ukraine. In a blow to Ukraine's economy, the Council forced a compromise reimposing tariff quotas for certain agricultural products in which Ukraine is especially competitive (Simon Arboleas and Sanches Manzanaro, 2024; Taran, 2023). These retrenchments help illustrate the limits of the Commission's ability to push forward the enlargement and security agenda. Notwithstanding the crisis leadership of the Commission, it is the Council where most key geopolitical decisions are taken. In just 4 months, between 24 February and 31 May 2022, there were four meetings of the Council in response to the war, including an extraordinary European Council, an informal European Council, a Special European Council and the scheduled Council on 24 and 25 March 2022. The agendas of subsequent meetings of the Council in its many formulations have continued to be dominated by the war. The key problem for the Council that became evident in 2023 and persists in 2024 is its leaderlessness as the Franco–German 'integration engine' has stopped functioning. In 2022, the absence of Franco–German leadership could be attributed to the shock of the war and the time necessary to reconsider longstanding policies. By 2023 and 2024, we see that strategic differences between France and Germany are obstructing a strong EU response. For over two decades, Germany and France privileged economic interests by pursuing a 'Russia first' approach whilst downplaying the security concerns of EU partners near Russia's borders. They refused to consider Ukraine as a potential candidate for EU membership even after unprecedented societal mobilization in the pursuit of an association agreement and a membership perspective in 2013–2014 (Burlyuk and Shapovalova, 2017; Popova and Shevel, 2023). This approach supported reconciliation and dialogue with Russia in forms that bordered on appeasement and became the de facto policy of the EU. Even after Russia's annexation of Crimea and the launch of the Donbas War in 2014, EU leaders sought to curb Russian aggression by asking Ukraine to accept limitations on its own sovereignty in tandem with deepening their own lucrative economic relations with Russia (Raik et al. , 2023). The 'partnership for modernization' and calls for 'Wandel durch Handel' (Change through trade) were justified with theories claiming that economic relations foster peace and boost bargaining power (Rabinovych, 2023). In this case, however, they helped create a stronger, more bellicose Russia, a weaker Ukraine and a weaker EU (Costa and Barbé, 2023, p. 432). Whilst Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has made this whole way of thinking about economic and security relations with the Kremlin obsolete, it has not yet brought about a shared vision of a new security order for Europe in Paris and Berlin. France and Germany have found common ground on further enlargement and even began discussions in 2023 on how and when it could take place (Franco–German Working Group, 2023). But they have diverged on how to respond strategically to the war. Germany in 2023 and 2024 has continually followed the US lead, adopting a policy of cautious assistance in the spirit of 'escalation management' and a 'negotiated solution'. Whilst maintaining leadership in the sheer amount of resources it contributes to Ukraine bilaterally and through European frameworks, Germany has placed many limits on the speed, the kind and the quantity of help it gives to Ukraine; some have characterized it using the German saying, 'too much to die, too little to live' (Karnitschnig, 2024). Germany has supported Ukraine's EU perspective, but only feebly. France, in contrast, has maintained its goal of building up the EU's 'strategic autonomy' but has vacillated greatly on how to achieve it. In 2022, President Macron first tried to make his mark by offering Putin dialogue and a way to face save. France also explored the European Political Community as a stand-in for new enlargement commitments and tried to deepen relations with China. In 2023 and 2024, France has made a volte-face: it now lends full-throated support to Ukraine's victory over Russia, embraces an enlargement path for Ukraine and supports the idea of sending foreign (including French) troops to Ukraine. However, for all of its declarative support, France's military and financial support for Ukraine is relatively low, 4 and France's farmers are as vocal as Poland's in seeking to block Ukraine's agricultural imports. Without German and US support, and with limited enthusiasm from other EU members, France's 'strategic autonomy' project appears, for now, far-fetched. But an important step towards any variety of a geopolitically stronger EU would be for France and Germany to agree on more ambitious joint strategies for helping Ukraine win the war whilst making plans for a realistic division of labour with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (Daßler and Weiss, 2024; see also Fiott, 2023). With the leadership and vision of France and Germany missing, 2023 became a leaderless year of ad hoc coalitions and individual state initiatives. On a positive note, Germany, Denmark and Lithuania created their own multiyear initiatives to assist Ukraine, whilst Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland and Lithuania were the first EU states to sign bilateral defence treaties with Ukraine in the first months of 2024. Another type of practical leadership was the Czech munition initiative, co-ordinating amongst about 20 governments to buy ammunition for Ukraine; this initiative was spurred by the clear failure of the EU's Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) initiative to meet its initial goals, including the very limited effectiveness of the European Defence Agency's participation in the project. On a more disruptive note, unanimous voting in the Council continues to give members opposed to EU support for Ukraine disproportionate leverage (Juncos and Pomorska, 2024). Hungary has stood out by making full use of its veto threat. In 2023, Hungary sent a letter to Charles Michel, arguing for eliminating the membership perspective and all but ending assistance to Ukraine. It also seized many opportunities to scuttle EU assistance to Ukraine, such as blocking sanctions rounds, taking entities off sanctions lists and delaying payments from the Ukraine Facility and the EPF. As the war has raised the stakes of disunity, Hungary has been able to use its veto threat effectively to extract payoffs from the EU and concessions from Ukraine (Bayer, 2023). Hungary even threatened to block the opening of Ukraine's membership negotiations and launched its Council presidency in July 2024 by visiting the Kremlin. As has been illustrated by the case of North Macedonia, a determined veto player can stop or indefinitely postpone the enlargement process and undermine the credibility of the EU, especially when strong leadership is absent in the Council (Brunnbauer, 2022). Poland presents a more complex case as an EU member that both champions and undermines the interconnectedness of security and enlargement. Since 2022, Poland has been one of the undisputed leaders in providing military and political assistance to Ukraine and supporting its accelerated path to EU membership. However, in 2023, Poland began trying to decouple its exceptional political support for Ukraine from harsh protectionist measures to benefit Polish agricultural producers. These measures started with a unilateral ban on Ukrainian agricultural exports to Poland in 2023, in violation of EU regulations. France followed suit, limiting Ukrainian agricultural imports, especially poultry. And Polish governments subsequently allowed truck drivers and farmers to block the Polish–Ukrainian border for 6 months, causing significant economic hardships for Ukraine and damaging bilateral relations (Taran, 2023). Despite the recent change in government (see Haughton et al. , 2024), it is likely that Poland will attempt to limit the access of Ukrainian agricultural products to the EU market throughout Ukraine's accession negotiations. Russia's full-scale war and Ukraine's steadfast response may well be a watershed moment for the EU: with lightning speed, leaders scripted for the EU a central role in helping Ukraine fight the war and in building a new European security system by way of EU enlargement and rising EU defence capabilities. We argue that the shock of 22 February 2024 was met with the EU's strongest and most daring enlargement and foreign policy response to date. The EU has the potential to project geopolitical power by anchoring European security through enlargement and defence, even as it pursues a geopolitical market strategy to leverage the power of its vast internal market (see McNamara, 2023; Orenstein, 2023). In 2023 and 2024, however, we see retrenchment and division amongst member states that have tamped down the Commission's crisis leadership and drifted apart in the absence of Franco–German leadership in the Council. This has facilitated a shift towards short-term political decision-making, even on the part of some of Ukraine's most ardent and strategic enlargement supporters. As has happened many times before, the interests of domestic producers in the EU are in competition with the EU's security interests, and the EU needs to do more to bridge them. Of greater peril for the EU, for Ukraine and for Europe's security, however, is the power wielded by Hungary, an authoritarian regime inside the EU that allies itself with the Kremlin and seeks to make the EU 'regime agnostic' (Kelemen, 2017; Meunier and Vachudova, 2018). As the war makes Hungary's veto more valuable and far-right parties remain powerful across Europe, the ability and will of EU leaders to push back against Hungary through intergovernmental decision-making may remain limited (Juncos and Pomorska, 2024; but see Kelemen, 2023). Meanwhile, the conditions are inauspicious for internal reforms that would bring more supranational decision-making to enlargement and defence capacity. Hungary joins other political parties and other forces that deny the links between winning the war, successful enlargement and a stronger geopolitical Europe. Instead of victory against Russia, these are voices calling for limiting aid to Ukraine and seeking an ephemeral 'negotiated solution', including territorial partition of Ukraine via de facto acceptance of Russian occupation of the conquered territories. Such plans are often twinned with a partial or staged enlargement as a consolation prize for Ukraine's lost citizens, territories and sovereignty. This is an untenable strategy that will strengthen the hands of authoritarian rule, damage European security and diminish the EU's power. We argue that the EU's future as a geopolitical actor is closely tied to the outcome of the war and to the credibility of a revived enlargement process. Can the EU stay the course, working with other allies and with NATO to ensure Ukraine receives enough assistance to win the war in tandem with pursuing a credible, merit-based enlargement process? Whilst the severe costs of an ongoing war should be enough, it may take another shock, such as a Russian military attack on an EU member or an even more gruesome attack inside Ukraine, to unblock another burst of momentum and unity. Until it ends, the war will test the EU's ability to act as a strong security player, delivering assistance with the limited instruments available today whilst searching for the political will for meaningful institutional reform and long-term capacity development. If the EU fails to assert itself as a powerful geopolitical player in countering Russian expansionism, it risks degrading its own security and losing its influence in the region and around the globe. For comments, insights and inspiration, we would like to thank Sorina Soare, Maryna Rabinovych, Katarina Mathernova, Aneta Spendzharova, Sophie Meunier, Maria Avdeeva, Rachel Epstein, Hilary Appel, Hannah Engel, Elena Baracani and Gianfranco Baldini.