Making enlargement work: What needs to change in the EU? | InvigoratEU Talks #05

Funda, there are other obstacles to enlargement, and these are bilateral disputes between member states and candidates, and the risk that public opinion or a referendum in a member state derails years of progress made.

What does Invigorate You propose here?

Actually, the aspects that you just were mentioning, the bilateral disputes between member states and candidates, or also between candidate countries and also public opinion, were among the main drivers that we analyzed for our visioning procedure with regards to the most resilient Europe.

And because we thought that this is really something that both affects the credibility of countries of the procedure and if then of course the credibility is impacted that also has a repercussion on public opinion so it's all interrelated.

The third aspect that we were also looking at was then the entire security dimension.

But starting with the bilateral disputes and I think here it's always the most prominent example is really North Macedonia to look at because North Macedonia is the only accession candidate country whose accession negotiations have officially started back in 2022, but not a single chapter has been opened so far.

So I think this is really something where bilateral disputes, in this case with Bulgaria, is actually impeding the process.

And then in the past, it was disputes with Greece with regards to the name and the flag of the country.

Ukraine is another case in point.

And then, you know, piggyback on that, basically also Moldova, because that was blocked by Hungary under the Orban government for a very long time.

So we need to take that seriously.

And if you then take a visioning procedure in the vision into the future, we actually thought that the EU... would need to step up its mediating role and also creating a separate track for engagement on bilateral disputes, we called it a standing mediation facility.

So really taking its role as a mediator seriously.

And in the past, we saw France being successful in that, you know, solving the disputes between North Macedonia and And Greece.

But then another thing that we also thought would be, and this kind of also links to the reversibility idea, is to having a monitored reversibility mechanism if it comes to conflicts between candidate countries, for example, Serbia and Kosovo.

where we then said, you know, that you could have the conditioned progress in accession negotiations conditioned to also progress in those conflicts.

And if it then kind of slides back, it also would reverse the progress in the accession candidate country.

Another thing is more conflicts between accession candidate countries and third actors.

And of course, that is more difficult to solve.

And then it would rather be the question of how to then structure the accession if those conflicts are not solved.

And I think Moldova is there, really the example with the Transnistrian case.

Regarding public opinion, Of course, this will have a big impact at the end of the accession procedure, but it's not sufficient to tackle that problem or that issue at the end of the procedure.

We need to take the public opinion along.

And it's really clear that Eurobarometer data have highlighted that support for EU enlargement persists, but it is weaker, more contested and more politically volatile than in previous decades.

And enlargement does not rank among the most priorities for the EU when it comes to public opinion.