‘Preparing for a wider EU’ is only half the challenge for Ukraine
The EU and its member states increasingly recognise enlargement as a geopolitical imperative, as discussions at last week’s European Council demonstrated. Amandine Sabourin and Sara Gianesello address a question that remains largely unresolved: Can the EU make enlargement work for candidates, existing members and itself?
More than four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine accelerated enlargement discussions, the debate has since then clearly shifted. The EU and member states increasingly recognise enlargement as a geopolitical imperative, with High Representative Kallas describing it as ‘the EU’s most successful foreign policy tool for decades’ at the Foreign Affairs Council last week, a view echoed by EU leaders at the European Council on 15–16 October. The question now is whether the EU can make enlargement work for candidates, existing members and itself.
The European Commission’s package ‘Preparing for a wider Union’, shared in October 2026, marks a significant attempt to put enlargement and EU internal reform on the same agenda. For too long, these have been largely treated as separate questions: conditionality and reform benchmarks on the candidate side, governance and decision-making on the EU side. The Commission’s package acknowledges that a larger Union will work only if the EU itself is willing to change how it operates.
This is a welcome, long-overdue step, but the Commission's package only partially addresses the challenges posed by the accession of Ukraine, arguably the candidate that makes EU internal reform most pressing, and the only one for which the EU is simultaneously running three agendas, now accelerated in parallel.
A larger Union, but still functional
A larger EU needs to be governable and politically functioning. But years of internal blockages, often fueled by the (over-)use of vetoes by individual member states, have left scars. It is therefore understandable that member states want to avoid importing new sources of paralysis into an already complex, often criticised slow decision-making system.
Yet concerns about the EU’s capacity to act are one side of the story. Member states are also weighing the political, economic and financial implications of a country like Ukraine: its large agricultural sector could impact the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and distribution of EU funds significantly, increase competition within the single market, including labour mobility, and a possible backsliding of democratic standards and the rule of law.
The harder task is reconciling competing national interests and spending priorities, as enlargement could shift the EU's political and strategic priorities further eastwards.
Current members also fear they may face higher contributions or a redistribution of funding towards new beneficiaries after accession. Yet past experiences show that the overall costs of enlargement are more manageable than often assumed. The harder task is reconciling competing national interests and spending priorities, as enlargement could shift the EU's political and strategic priorities further eastwards, with implications for how attention and resources are allocated across different regions and policy areas.
These concerns surfaced in five ‘non-papers’ circulated by member states this year. Proposed changes range from gradual integration before accession to longer transition periods and temporary limitations on certain decision-making rights for new members. The Commission's package meets them halfway while keeping enlargement politically credible on three fronts.
First, to prevent further veto blockages, the Commission proposes greater use of the ‘passerelle clause’, which would help move to qualified majority voting in selected areas (including opening of negotiating clusters in accession processes) and of the ‘constructive abstention’, which allows a country to step back from a unanimous decision on foreign or security policy without blocking it. Yet activating the passerelle clause still requires unanimity, leaving the EU dependent on the very mechanism it is trying to circumvent.
Second, to address concerns about the EU’s ability to enforce its democratic standards and the rule of law after accession, the package includes stronger safeguards and follow-up under Article 7 (the EU's existing rule of law procedure) and possible cuts in financial support or suspension of voting rights for serious breaches of democratic principles and the rule of law during the first 15 years of membership.
Finally, the package promotes gradual integration, offering candidates earlier access to selected EU policies and sectors (energy, transport, digital, defence). This could deliver tangible benefits to candidate countries and their citizens, while building the capacity needed for membership, provided that integration remains conditional and reversible.
Why Ukraine is the stress test
These proposals prepare the EU for future enlargements, but they do not address a central challenge in the EU's existing relationship with Ukraine, namely how to manage reconstruction, accession and security as parts of a coherent long-term partnership.
Ukraine is not simply the largest accession candidate, or the most geopolitically complex, it is the only candidate for which the EU’s partnership already operates simultaneously across three different institutional tracks.
Ukraine is not simply the largest accession candidate, or the most geopolitically complex, it is the only candidate for which the EU’s partnership already operates simultaneously across three different institutional tracks. The €50 billion Ukraine facility runs through the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Enlargement and Eastern Neighbourhood (DG ENEST) and combines financial support, investment and reforms through three pillars with their own governance arrangements. The accession process instead follows a separate institutional track involving the Council of the EU’s enlargement working party (COELA), accession cluster negotiations, and the Commission’s enlargement directorate. Lastly, security and defence cooperation, including the European Peace Facility, the €150 billion SAFE instrument, the EU military assistance mission, as well as several member states’ bilateral contributions, operates through yet another set of mechanisms, largely outside the civilian architecture.
Each track has its own priorities, institutional interlocutors (in Kyiv, in Brussels, and in the capitals) and accountability structures, with no single Council working party or European Commissioner holding a comprehensive view across all three.
The package works for a regular candidate to the EU: gradual integration, stronger safeguards and more effective decision-making are all key. But for Ukraine, it would be necessary to limit the costs of institutional fragmentation. For instance, the reform conditionality under the facility and accession conditionality under the enlargement process would benefit from greater alignment, as they are currently developed through separate processes, creating confusion.
Similarly, the security and defence dimension of Ukraine’s relationship with the EU remains largely disconnected from the reconstruction and accession architecture. Last week’s EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting could have been the opportunity to put perspective on both the opening of two additional enlargement clusters and the financing gap for 2027. The October European Council acknowledged this concern only implicitly, calling for timely disbursement of 2026 commitments without addressing what comes next.
Treating these tracks separately is a structural problem that further discussions on the reform of the EU in the perspective of enlargement must address.
Roadmaps: Differentiation vs coherence?
The Commission’s roadmaps for Montenegro, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine, expected in early November, will offer another opportunity to assess how the EU intends to translate its renewed enlargement ambitions into practice. Each roadmap is supposed to provide a clearer plan in terms of timelines and deliverables, which allows differentiation and coping with the countries’ respective political realities, as well as their various levels of preparedness.
EU leaders reaffirmed this differentiated approach at the last European Council and it seems the most productive and honest way. Montenegro is the most advanced candidate and could conclude negotiations in the coming years, while Ukraine’s accession trajectory remains closely connected to the evolution of the war.
For Ukraine, however, a roadmap could go beyond defining reform benchmarks and accession milestones. It is an opportunity to identify how the different strands of EU engagement should reinforce each other, including how conditionality under the Ukraine Facility can be better aligned with accession requirements, how reconstruction investments can support Ukraine's longer-term integration and how security and resilience considerations can be reflected more systematically across relevant accession chapters.
Two tests, one partnership
The Commission’s package asks the right question: how can the EU enlarge without weakening its capacity to function? Enlargement is becoming a test of the EU's capacity to reform itself; for Ukraine, it is also a test of the EU's capacity to act coherently and strategically across the different dimensions of its partnership. The upcoming roadmap in November is the first place to show progress.
The views are those of the authors and not necessarily those of ECDPM.
