THE EU IS SUFFERING FROM ‘ENLARGEMENT FATIGUE’
by Justin Stares
06 March 2012
With the Balkans about to be brought into the European Union fold,
there are few other countries with a realistic chance of joining
Who will be next to join the European Union’s list of candidate
countries? When the mopping up operation in the Balkans is complete,
there are very few real suitors left. After the recent green light
from the European Council, Serbia is on its merry way towards
full membership. Belgrade joins neighbour Montenegro as an approved
candidate and negotiations with Montenegro are expected to start this
summer. Albania, too, is fast approaching the EU’s required standards,
according to the European Commission. While currently a “potential
candidate”, Albania is expected to be the next country to make the
approved list.
The more problematic Balkan states will also no doubt become members
in the medium term. Macedonia, or more precisely the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia, is officially a candidate country – though its
negotiation timetable has been held up by a name dispute with Greece.
Kosovo and Serbia will have to kiss and make up at some point; Kosovo
is a potential EU candidate. Bottom of the class for the moment comes
Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to commission insiders, Bosnia is
going backwards rather than forwards.
After which, the enlargement train looks likely to grind to a
complete halt. The United Kingdom and others have promoted the
candidacy of Turkey – but hostility in France, Germany and Austria
is such that Ankara’s chances must be close to zero. “Turkey is not
always Europe’s ally,” says Jana Kobzova, a fellow of the European
Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “They took on the role of
mediator with Iran without consulting the EU or the United States,”
Kobzova tells PublicServiceEurope.com.
Money and the free movement of people are the principal attractions
for EU candidates. While Brussels has become less generous over time,
the amount set aside for “pre-accession assistance” – ~@14 billion
between 2014 and 2020 – is not to be sniffed at. Cash is on the other
hand not an issue for Norway and Switzerland, whose governments are
so rich they can afford to pick and choose the aspects of European
integration they fancy – while remaining on the outside. Norwegian
voters have made it very clear that they prefer things this way.
Lichtenstein, San Marino, Monaco, Andorra and the Vatican City
state – more suburbs than countries really – also gain from staying
out. They are close enough to the EU core to reap the benefits of
their tax-haven status. Tiny Iceland, despite its recent travails,
is eligible to join if its people so desire.
Part of Russia lies in Europe. Could it one day join? Sadly not.
Former commission president Romano Prodi said Russia was simply “too
big” for the EU. He invented this previously unheard of membership
criterion – population size – when politicians in Moscow began to
express an interest. That leaves a few question marks hanging over
countries that will probably never achieve full membership, though
they do have an outside chance. Moldova could be absorbed easily by
the EU, though Kobzova points out that this would set a precedent
for neighbouring Ukraine. “Small countries like Moldova fall victim
to the problems of their bigger neighbours,” she says. Enlargement
enthusiasts in Britain sometimes talk of Ukraine as a potential union
member. But would member states want to give Ukraine’s 45 million
population access to their job markets and social benefits? While it
would be in the long-term strategic interest of Poland to bring Ukraine
into the family, the probability of any application succeeding is slim.
With Belarus stuck in the dark ages and Georgia’s border problems much
too unsettling, the list of potential candidates is almost exhausted.
The remaining two European countries – Armenia and Azerbaijan – almost
never get a mention. Contacted by PublicServiceEurope.com, a diplomat
from Azerbaijan’s EU embassy in Brussels laughs out loud when asked
if his country is headed for membership. “Are you inviting us to join?”
he says. After calming down, he continues, on condition of anonymity:
“We are not ready for the EU and the EU is not ready for us. There is
a lot of enlargement fatigue in Brussels”. One of Armenia’s foreign
policy priorities is “integration with the European family”, though it
too has issues in Nagorno-Karabakh that Europe will not want to import.
Enlargement optimists in North Africa and the Middle East have
suggested that the EU may one day expand beyond its geographic base.
Morocco actually applied for membership in the 1980s. Enlargement of
this kind is, however, considered by most to be a flight of fancy.
Whereas the EU is in theory open to all democratic European countries,
apart from Russia, there is another unspoken membership criterion:
wealth. Poor countries are less eligible than rich countries. What
does this mean for Scotland, should it secede from the UK? Nobody,
not even Brussels insiders, knows the answer to this question.
http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/1600/the-eu-is-suffering-from-enlargement-fatigue