Defiant regional leaders resist the road map to EU membership

Last August, Charles Michel, president of the European Council, which groups EU national leaders, said the bloc should be ready to expand to the east by 2030. Even at the time, it sounded optimistic. José Manuel Barroso, who led the European Commission from 2004 to 2014, called Michel’s proposal “aspirational” — a euphemism for too ambitious.

Subsequent events in several applicant countries, notably Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia, lend weight to Barroso’s assessment. They illustrate that the obstacles to enlargement go beyond the challenge of redesigning the EU’s institutions and financial arrangements to make it possible. Far from fulfilling the membership criteria, some states display political trends that point in the other direction.

In the Balkans, the queue for entry includes Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine are also candidates, as is Turkey — at least in theory. The EU correctly judges that the threats to European security, encapsulated in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, make enlargement desirable and even necessary.

However, there is no free ticket into the club. Applicants must meet certain standards on democracy, the rule of law and alignment with EU foreign policy, not to mention a free-market economy. These apply even if the EU pursues its useful idea of according some benefits of accession to states before they become full members with voting rights.

Serbia supplies an example of a country deliberately choosing not to meet the EU’s criteria. Last week, it hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping and agreed to pursue a “shared future” with Beijing. Even before Xi’s arrival in Belgrade, President Aleksandar Vučić appointed a new government that includes two ministers, including a former state security chief, sanctioned by the US for their closeness to Russia.

Vučić’s actions are not some aberration that will be corrected by the hard-pressed democratic opposition or by Serbian society. Public support for EU entry is, in fact, lower in Serbia than in any Balkan candidate state. In courting Russia and China while appearing to favour EU entry, Vučić exemplifies a tradition of playing one foreign power off against another that goes back to Serbia’s 19th-century struggle for independence, and that also found expression in Josip Broz Tito’s non-alignment policy for communist Yugoslavia.

In North Macedonia, the victories of rightwing nationalist forces in last week’s presidential and parliamentary elections set back that country’s EU prospects. One condition of entry is that North Macedonia should meet various demands of Bulgaria, its neighbour and an EU member since 2007, relating to language, national identity and history. North Macedonia’s new rulers oppose making these concessions and for good measure are offending Greece.

The rivalry of Bosnia’s ethnically based parties has paralysed state institutions, such that EU accession is hardly any closer than during the 1992-95 war there. Little will change as long as Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb leader, flirts with secession and plays down the 1995 massacre of Muslim Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica.

Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s strongman leader, has moved in a sharply anti-democratic direction. This entails a Russian-style law on “foreign agents”, passed on Tuesday despite mass street protests, and changes to Georgia’s tax code that defy EU rules.

Enlargement is in difficulty partly because the region is exposed to Russian and Chinese meddling. But another reason is that some countries are in the grip of deeply entrenched forces suspicious of EU membership or the steps required for entry. The EU’s democratic values and offers of economic aid may not suffice to overcome them.

tony.barber@ft.com