Ukraine’s EU road is littered with obstacles

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A year ago, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, told Ukraine’s parliament: “There is a long road ahead but Europe will be at your side every step of the way, for as long as it takes, from these dark days of war until the moment you cross the door that leads into our European Union.”

She was right that Ukraine’s road to the EU will be long. Just how long became apparent when Ukraine’s push to join Nato, the western world’s other premier institution, received the delicately worded response in July that the alliance would issue an invitation when “allies agree and conditions are met”.

If anything, EU membership may turn out to be even harder for Ukraine to secure than Nato entry. In both cases, unanimous agreement among alliance states is a prerequisite for expanding the membership. As Sweden has discovered since applying to join Nato, this process is not necessarily smooth.

But Ukraine’s EU bid raises an additional set of formidable challenges. In the first place, it is entangled with the process, to which the EU is formally committed, of admitting at least five other countries: Albania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. Like Ukraine, none comes close for the moment to meeting the EU’s exacting requirements on democracy, the rule of law, a functioning market economy and an ability to fulfil the obligations of bloc membership.

Turkey is the sixth official EU entry candidate, but its membership prospects — never strong even when Brussels and Ankara enjoyed a more constructive relationship than now — are remote in the extreme. The queue at the EU’s door also includes Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Kosovo.

This long line of potential entrants, which would expand the EU club from 27 to 33 or even 37 countries, throws light on a second obstacle to the bloc’s expansion. No matter how desirable as a way of stabilising Europe’s eastern and south-eastern neighbourhood, enlargement will require far-reaching changes to the EU’s institutions, policies and financial arrangements for which neither national governments nor electorates in most of the 27 member states appear prepared.

With respect to institutions, it would be difficult but not impossible to accommodate new members by reallocating seats in the European parliament, reweighting votes in the European Council (in which national governments meet) and redesigning the commission. Much more vexed is the question of whether, or how, to replace unanimity in fields such as taxation and foreign policy with a system of majority voting.

This is precisely what German chancellor Olaf Scholz proposed in a speech last year at Charles University in Prague. He correctly pointed out that, as enlargement proceeded, the risk would grow that one country could use its veto to block a common policy. If, however, the EU decided to stick with majority voting, various groups of countries might choose to move ahead on their own in different policy areas. “It would be a confusing tangle — and an invitation to all those who want to bet against a united geopolitical Europe and play us off against each other,” Scholz observed.

It is a strong argument but not everyone likes it. Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, told an audience at Germany’s University of Heidelberg in March that the EU’s responses to the debt crisis and pandemic each exposed “the limits of supranational governance in Europe”. Expanding on his implicit criticism of Scholz’s proposals, Morawiecki added: “In Europe, nothing will safeguard the freedom of nations, their culture, their social, economic, political and military security better than nation states. Other systems are illusory or utopian.”

It is ironic that Poland, a fervent supporter of Ukraine’s EU entry, objects to the kind of institutional reforms that might make enlargement workable. But the irony does not end there. Like Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, Poland wants the EU to extend curbs on Ukrainian grain imports in order to protect domestic farmers.

This dispute suggests how hard it will be for the EU to incorporate Ukraine, one of the world’s largest agricultural producers but also one of Europe’s poorest countries even before the war. Without extensive reform of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and regional aid schemes, Ukraine would have an enormous claim on the EU budget — some 65 per cent of which goes to these two spending programmes.

Other candidate countries, admittedly smaller than Ukraine, would also expect access to the EU’s largesse. Yet budgetary reform on the scale needed to pay for enlargement would mean less for many states in central and eastern Europe that have received tens of billions of euros since joining the EU from 2004 onwards. Are political parties and voters ready for such concessions in the name of a safer Europe? Let us not forget that another obstacle in Ukraine’s path is Hungary’s allegation that western Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority suffers mistreatment.

The EU, anxious to reward Ukraine for its courageous resistance to Russian aggression, can and must press on with enlargement. Ukraine and others should be given benefits, such as some access to EU funds and a voice in policymaking, even before gaining full membership. Even so, enlargement promises to be the most difficult task in the EU’s almost 70-year history.

tony.barber@ft.com