[ad_1]
Receive free EU enlargement updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest EU enlargement news every morning.
The EU risks “importing instability” if it relaxes its standards on democracy and corruption to hasten the accession of Ukraine and other candidate countries, Denmark’s foreign minister has warned.
Lars Løkke Rasmussen told the Financial Times his government supported EU membership for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and the western Balkans but said “geopolitical circumstances” did not justify skating over governance reforms.
“If you don’t complete the reform process before you enter, then there could be a risk of slowing down afterwards. And [in that case] we do not export stability, we risk importing instability. And that’s why it is so important to stress the need of fulfilling the [EU membership] criteria.”
Denmark, together with France and the Netherlands, blocked the EU accession bids of Albania and North Macedonia in 2019, in effect torpedoing the entire EU enlargement process.
Rasmussen, a former centre-right prime minister, said Denmark had reversed its position and was even open to internal EU reform, including more majority voting, to accommodate new members.
It is 30 years since EU leaders meeting in the Danish capital agreed a set of criteria on democracy, the rule of law and a functioning market economy in anticipation of a wave of new members, including several former communist bloc countries.
Marking the anniversary, candidate countries were invited to a conference hosted by Rasmussen in Copenhagen this week. Representatives of the Baltic states, which joined the bloc in 2004, were in attendance, as though to underscore the benefits of meeting EU standards in full. Officials from Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria — all accused of backsliding on rule of law or democratic standards after joining the EU — were not invited.
Rasmussen said he did “not intend to comment on specific countries”, but said it was “much easier to complete reforms when you are heading towards a membership than it is if you have already joined”.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has demanded fast-track EU accession to anchor his country in the west in defiance of Russian aggression.
Rasmussen said if there was to be “special treatment” for Ukraine, it should be in the form of extra help with full engagement of EU governments to help Kyiv meet the standards. The process had been too bureaucratic in the past, he added.
“We want to invest and we want to assist and we want to be as positive and help some as possible, but we can’t lower the bar.”
The EU would need to be “innovative” and offer some benefits — he cited participation in the EU’s Horizon scientific research programme — to candidate countries before full accession.
Rasmussen would not put a timeline on membership for Ukraine or other applicants, but added “everybody realised that for geopolitical reasons we must step up as much as possible”. That meant the EU had to address its own capacity to absorb potentially several new members.
“We need at some stage to look at the rules of the game and we are ready to do that. And that’s a new Danish position. We haven’t the answers yet. I’m not in a position where I can say that we are in favour of [more] qualified majority voting, but at least and that’s a new position compared to a year ago,” he said.
Asked whether the turmoil in Russia and fears of a regime collapse might alter western support for Ukraine, Rasmussen said: “We should just stay on track and do what we are doing. And what we are doing actually proves that we are [on] the right side of history and that Russia is something which can be dealt with.”
But he hoped that “partners in the global south” — including Brazil, India and South Africa — that had refused to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine “might be motivated by what they are witnessing now” to shift position.
[ad_2]
Source link