COMMENTARY

Spring 2010

by Katinka Barysch

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Eastward enlargement has been one of the EU’s greatest successes. By opening its doors and stretching out a helping hand, the EU has contributed to transforming 10 central and eastern European countries from post-communist confusion into open market, well-functioning democracies. Of course the EU’s new members aren’t perfect; the 2008-09 global financial crisis has laid bare their economic weaknesses. The fight against corruption, cronyism and crime has slowed in some places, and massive investments in skills, technology and infrastructure are still needed to bring the eastern Europeans up to western European living standards.

But as Mart Laar argues, there is no doubt that people in the new EU countries live longer, healthier, happier and more secure lives than they would otherwise enjoy. The clear conclusion is that the EU must continue enlargement to help stabilise the regions that lie beyond its expanded eastern border. Yet the accession process is widely perceived to be in trouble, with would-be members queuing for decades while the EU is busy gazing at own navel.

This picture is not quite accurate because enlargement is still progressing. At the end of last year Slovenia finally lifted its veto on Croatian membership talks (the result of a spat over a small stretch of coastal access). Croatia is likely to be a member within a couple of years and Iceland could soon follow. Serbia has just handed in its official application for membership, following applications from Albania and Montenegro over the previous 12 months. Serbs, together with Macedonians and Montenegrins, now travel to the EU visa-free – a hugely important change for the people of the western Balkans. Turkey has beefed up its machinery for managing the accession process and has started negotiations in the tricky area of EU environmental rules; some observers still hope that movement towards a Cyprus settlement could unblock other negotiating chapters.

But it is also true that enlargement is progressing more slowly than in the run up to the 2004 / 2007 “big bang” enlargement. There are several reasons for this. The current group of candidates is less well prepared and in many ways much harder to absorb than the 2004 intake. The countries of the western Balkans suffer from dodgy business environments, structurally high unemployment, weak and corrupt state administrations and, in some places, organised crime.

Some people in the western Balkans say that the EU should not be too tough: after all Bulgaria and Romania didn’t match EU standards in many areas when they joined. That is true, but many EU politicians and officials have since regretted allowing those two countries to join in 2007 because once in they further relaxed their reform efforts. So the argument is now that for the EU to have made a mistake once is not a good enough reason to repeat it.

Much the same goes too for admitting Cyprus without having reached a settlement on the divided island – another EU mistake. Several of the Balkan applicants have unresolved issues of borders, ethnicity and sovereignty. They could follow Cyprus, which has used its EU membership to block important decisions on Turkey and European security policy to strengthen its hands in the settlement talks.

Turkey – although better prepared than most western Balkan applicants – poses a different set of challenges. Turkey is a proud country with a dynamic economy and growing expectations of regional leadership. It does not fit so easily into the EU’s accession paradigm, whereby the EU sets the rules and each candidate must demurely apply them to prove its suitability as a member of the club.

These impediments on the part of the candidate countries are met by a sense of enlargement fatigue on the part of the EU. There are now more EU citizens against any further enlargement (46%) than are in favour (43%), according to a Eurobarometer survey last year. Rising unemployment within the EU will reinforce this scepticism as many Europeans associate enlargement with influxes of cheap labour. The kind of political leadership needed to defuse such fears is lacking. Berlin and Paris have toned down their calls for a ‘privileged partnership’ with Turkey, but they are still openly dubious about admitting so populous and predominantly Muslim a country. France continues to hold up various chapters in Turkey’s accession negotiations.

The indifferent, sometimes hostile, mood in the EU removes the candidates’ incentives for rapid reform. Most Turks want membership, but an overwhelming majority is convinced that the EU will not let them in no matter what. The absence of progress in the candidate countries plays, in turn, into the hands of those in the EU who say that enlargement should be stopped, or at least put on hold for a very long time. The risk of a vicious circle is all too clear.

The EU cannot afford, though, to be ringed to the east by countries that are poor, disgruntled and unstable. It is not only the current candidates that need the EU as an anchor, so too do the EU’s other eastern neighbours: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and, across the Black Sea, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The EU’s ‘Eastern Partnership’ is designed to draw these countries closer, but its attractiveness will be much reduced if the EU cannot offer a membership perspective, however faint. The relative prosperity and democratic stability of its new members should serve as a constant reminder of what the EU can – and must – achieve in its neighbourhood.