Leonid Litra, Senior Research Fellow of the New Europe Center

The accession process to the EU, aside from the normative and reform side, appears to be a unique blend of creative mechanisms to slow down the process but also to speed it up. Making Ukraine and Moldova candidate states is by far the biggest positive process that has been taking place in the region for the last years. At this stage, widely speaking, there is a lack of awareness of what the candidate status entails, both from a whole of society perspective but also widely in the government. Despite demanding the membership in the EU for a long time, offering the candidate status found the governments largely unprepared to “eat the main course in the EU menu”. That is why both governments, in Ukraine and Moldova, are looking for a holistic approach in their accession strategy. However, no matter how professional will Kyiv and Chisinau be able to line up their accession policy, these need to consider the experience of the recent accession process and the tricks that could arise.

The experience of the Central European states and the Baltic states is often the main reference for the accession process. Although this experience in invaluable, especially in terms of the speed of the accession and quality of reforms (at least at the moment of accession), today, the most relevant experience for Ukraine, Moldova and hopefully Georgia, is represented by the Balkan case. Unfortunately, the Balkan case is not very inspiring for Kyiv and Chisinau. Yet, it represents the most realistic picture of what Ukraine and Moldova will have to confront with.

The membership perspective for the Balkans was recognized in 2003 and it took years until North Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania and Serbia became candidate states, while Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are still potential candidates. Next year, in 2023 there will be 20 years since the process started and only Croatia managed in get in. For the rest of the Balkans the process stalled, on both sides. The promise of the membership is not credible since it did not lead to anywhere for so many years. The same are reforms in certain Balkan countries. Therefore, countries lose interest and pretend to do reforms while EU pretend to integrate these countries.  It often reminds of the old soviet joke “we pretend to work and you pretend to pay us”. The credibility of the accession process is weakened in many ways.

With the EU candidate status, Ukraine and Moldova, despite the different “weight” category, are tied now in the accession process. The examples from the Balkans shows that this could be a weakness but also a strength. Albania and North Macedonia were ready to start accession negotiations with the EU. But Skopje and Sofia had a historical dispute that stalled the process. Because of the Bulgarian veto on the start of negotiations with the EU on North Macedonia, Albania has been held hostage until a possible solution has been brokered by France.

Countries such as Montenegro, which is assessed as being widely ready to join the EU, is also trying to open the closed door of the EU. In this case, the unreadiness is largely on the side of the EU. The need for an EU internal reform became more evident with the increasing divergent views of the member states, especially on the decisions that require unanimity. In western EU capitals such as Berlin and The Hague, one often hears disappointment with the fact that some countries that joined the EU during the “big bang” are not sharing the same values as the “old Europe”. The latest example is the sixth package of sanctions against Russia that was blocked only by Budapest. Therefore, the EU explains, often though president Macron, that it does not want to accept new members until EU does not reform and become a robust entity. Accepting new members, they say, could even more harm the EU decision-making.

In the course of the advocacy for the candidate status, Ukraine and Moldova, for a large part, played its own game. This strategy hardly brought any positive results. One of the important principles of the EU enlargement is the good relations between neighbors. Therefore, for the sake of the EU accession, Ukraine and Moldova will have to find a common denominator and reduce to minimum its misunderstandings. The same is valid for the relations with other EU member states that could block the process if the latter wants. As long as the two countries are tied, the progress will be made only when both perform well. A bad track record on reforms will impact also on the perspectives of the other. At this stage, both countries should be interested to go together and synchronize their agenda. Ukraine’s political weight increased which makes EU more flexible in approaching a number of issues which seemed difficult to change before: cancelation of quotas for certain goods; accelerated integration into the EU energy market; acceleration of integration in the transport area, etc. But also, Moldova has certain advantages: it has a good track record in reforms and positive perception in the EU; special relation with France and a very special relation with Romania which also entails speedy and free of charge access to EU aquis communitaire; but also a number of Moldovans who have Romanian citizenship and work in the EU institutions – a photo of Sandu in Brussels while meeting Moldovans working in the EU institutions shows how massive this is.

However, despite the paramount importance of the reforms, one has to consider also the strategic framework of the accession process. Until countries involved in the process are not considered “one of us” in the EU, until then there is a serious moral border that is damaging the process. For many countries inside the Union the EU ends at the border with Poland and Romania. This is something that needs to be worked out together by Kyiv and Chisinau. Both countries have the potential of having its own advocacy agents – Poland for Ukraine and Romania for Moldova – but provided that the agents themselves do not have problems within the EU.

All the perception divergencies could change if there is a hard work being made. Another moral barrier that EU use to have was the informal veto power of Russia on any enlargement process in the “shared neighborhood”. After the Russian large-scale invasion, the EU almost got rid of any Russian veto-power and took control of its own processes.

Ukraine and Moldova should synchronize their EU accession agenda. At the same time, synchronization should not be perceived as being part of the same basket, otherwise these could become hostage of each other like in the case of Albania and North Macedonia. This would mean that instead of pushing forward each other in fact countries will hold back each other.

Media-version was published by “European Pravda”in Ukrainian here.