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Shkruar nga Chris Powers
Several EU countries, including Austria and Greece, are against accelerating Ukraine's accession process and demand that the Western Balkan countries be treated with the same criteria and not be left behind in EU enlargement...
A number of European Union countries, including Austria and Greece, are slowing down the progress of Ukraine's accession process by insisting that the Western Balkan countries not be overlooked and left at the back of the queue.
This opposition comes alongside other obstacles, such as Hungary's blocking of the opening of Ukraine's accession negotiations due to issues related to the rights of the Hungarian ethnic minority in Ukraine, concerns raised by Poland about agriculture and the road transport sector, and the slow pace at which the Ukrainian parliament is adopting the required reforms.
"The same rules and conditions should apply to all candidates. Here we always have this special focus on the Western Balkan countries," Austrian Minister for Europe Claudia Bauer told reporters during a ministerial meeting in Brussels on May 26.
"For some there is a fast lane, where some may already have a foot inside the European Union, while others have to work for decades for membership," Bauer said.
An EU diplomatic source told the Kyiv Independent that, while Greece “supports the accession process of Ukraine and Moldova ... it is essential that progress on their path to membership is not made to the detriment of the Western Balkans, whose European perspective has been clearly recognized since the 2003 Thessaloniki Agenda.”
Since that 2003 meeting, when the EU officially recognized that the Western Balkan countries have a future within the union, only Slovenia (2004) and Croatia (2013) have managed to become members of the bloc.
Montenegro and Albania are next, respectively, with Montenegro expected to be the next country to join the EU, while Albania passed an important milestone towards membership on May 26.
Other countries in the region lag significantly behind.
North Macedonia has had candidate country status since 2005, but further progress was blocked for years by Greece and is now being hampered by a dispute with Bulgaria over ethnic identity issues.
Serbia became a candidate country in 2005, made progress in meeting the membership criteria, but has seen democratic regression. This has prompted the EU to discuss freezing Belgrade's access to European funds.
Meanwhile, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo have not yet become formal candidates for membership.
Ukraine surpassed both of these countries when it received candidate status in 2022. If it starts opening groups of negotiation chapters, as expected in June, it will also surpass North Macedonia.
The taste of compromise
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz sent a letter to the presidents of EU institutions on May 18, proposing additional rights within the union for all candidate countries and a form of associated membership for Ukraine.
"Merz's proposal rightly recognizes the geopolitical necessity of enlargement, while Berlin's initiative is a pragmatic attempt to reconcile this imperative with the reluctance felt in many national capitals towards special treatment of Ukraine," Martin Leng of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics told the Kyiv Independent.
The German chancellor first floated the idea during an informal meeting of EU leaders in April, but the letter was the first official step in pushing the initiative forward. In it, he called for the creation of a working group to deal with the issue.
Although Germany supports Ukraine's full membership in the EU and wants negotiations to move forward as quickly as possible, Merz's idea for associate membership was poorly received in Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelensky ruled out any alternative that does not lead to full membership.
Bauer also stated: "we are willing to discuss this idea here, but there should not be two classes of candidates, a position also expressed by several other European leaders."
EU heads of government will have the opportunity to discuss Merz's proposal during a meeting with Western Balkan countries on June 5 and again at the EU leaders' summit on June 18.
For Leng, the reactions to Merz's plan reveal an uncomfortable truth: "there is no longer a suitable fig leaf to hide the broader reluctance to expand the European Union."
“Ultimately, Kiev will have to get used to Brussels’ not-always-satisfactory compromises, which are also an integral part of the European project,” Leng said. / Adapted from “Pamphlet,” by “Kyiv Independent”
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