States across eastern and southern Europe are preparing the ground to apply to join the EU even as Britain enters the final stages this week of its three-year attempt to leave the trading bloc.
Five countries including Turkey, Albania and Serbia are “recognised” candidates for EU membership, while Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are potential members. Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova are signatories to the Eastern Partnership, a talking shop that prepares poorer and more fragile countries for future candidacy.
Yakiv Smolii, governor of the National Bank of Ukraine saidthat his country’s “goal was to enter the European family — to be perceived as being European”.
Moldova’s finance minister Natalia Gavrilita said her country was “not going to give up [its] objective” of joining the single market, adding: “EU accession means higher prosperity and more individual freedom and human rights.”
But some observers fear none of these states will ever become full members of the big club. The European Commission, Germany and France have little appetite for expansion — there are no plans to enlarge the EU before 2025 — and most would-be candidates will struggle to meet the increasingly stringent entry criteria.
Sylvain Broyer, chief economist for EMEA at S&P Global Ratings, said: “It has become more difficult for non-EU countries to join the EU.”
Marjan Divjak, a senior adviser to the finance ministry of EU member Slovenia, said while he would “like to see the doors open” to new candidates, the criteria for candidacy were not going to be easy to meet. He urged Brussels to relax its entry rules for poorer and weaker sovereigns “to ensure they are appropriate for the present situation”.
Honest partner
Experts urged the European Union to be honest with its would-be partners and offer them a firm pathway to membership. “The EU has to decide if it wants to get bigger or deeper. It can’t have its cake and eat it,” said Paul Sheard, a senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani centre for business development at Harvard Kennedy School. Albania, Serbia and Montenegro were moving “at a snail’s pace” toward membership, while Turkey’s application was “in limbo, if not in effect dead”, he said.
This matters, because many of the states on Europe’s accession list were once part of the Soviet Union and Russia’s cultural and political pull endures. Alexandru Fala, research head at Expert Group, a Moldovan consultancy, noted the schism in his country’s society, where people are either Europhiles or Russophiles.
“I don’t know which direction we will go, whether in the European or the Eurasian direction,” he says. “The answer depends on whether Moldova joins the EU.” But he believes it will take another 20 or even 30 years before that happens. By then, the country may not want to be part of the club.