During 28-29 of November, The New Europe Center organized the 1st Accession Exchange Forum with the participation of high government officials and leading experts n Kyiv.
The two-day offline event was devoted to exchanging thoughts on the accession process, discussing good practices, new ideas, and lessons learned, and exploring the opportunities in the relations between European Union, countries of Eastern Europe and Western Balkans.
Namely, the discussion panels were devoted to the following issues:
- EU candidate status for Ukraine and Moldova and potential candidate for Georgia: the road to membership
- Western Balkans and Eastern Europe in one basket: reforms, perspectives, and synergies for speeding up the accession process
- Parliaments’ role in the accession process: political consensus on accession reforms as a driver of success
- Russian war against Ukraine: implications for the EU accession process
- Staged accession and reform of the enlargement methodology: how to accelerate EU membership?
Video recording of the Forum is available here: 1st day and 2nd day.
Below you will find some key points from our speakers:
Alyona Getmanchuk, Director of the New Europe Center:
“To secure Ukraine’s survival we need weapons, to secure Ukraine’s development we need membership in the EU. We don’t ask for special treatment, we are not looking for shortcuts .But before we need to start a real accession process. We don’t ask for special treatment, we are not looking for shortcuts. We just want to have an accession process which is real, which is meaningful and which is merit based”.
Olga Stefanishyna, Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration:
“It is not the EU or Ukraine who start from scratch. Granting Ukraine the EU candidate status was not to start the process, but to praise the reforms which have been on the way for years. The candidate status is not the beginning of the way – it is actually how to make sure we are finally part of the EU and we will proceed with that without any delays”.
Matti Maasikas, Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine:
“The war in itself has not hampered any processes of EU integration. It’s very much on Ukraine’s capacities of delivering on 7 recommendations, on adopting regulations and standards to better integrate the EU single market”.
Oleksandr Sushko, Executive Director of the International Renaissance Foundation:
“Ukraine is no longer in a position to waste a chance. Approaching EU colleagues we should not say ‘take us aboard, we will be a big weight for your train’. Now Ukraine will be one of the locomotives of the European future”.
Ihor Zhovkva, Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine:
“Ukraine has already united the ЕU around its issue. In March, there was skepticism on the candidacy for Ukraine. But we did job of convincing skeptics: Ukraine is capable of fulfilling our home task! And we will be as demanding as before the candidate status”.
Cristina Gherasimov, Head of Office of President of the Republic of Moldova:
“All of the EU candidates have action plans, which we are working on individually, but we also have common challenges. Here I`d see the room for cooperation in terms of understanding better what we could do. We all struggle with justice system reform. We all want to clean up our judiciaries better. We all want to have better prosecutors. Here is something that we could share, but there are individual problems, of course”.
Stanislav Secrieru, Senior Analyst at European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS):
“The war removed the taboo of discussing enlargement to the East. It compelled the EU to think about the enlargement not only as a technical process but also as the security tool which provides a sustainable insurance for need a long-term security of the EU”.
Gustav Gressel, Senior Policy Fellow with the Wider Europe Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR):
“The war clearly showed that all the narratives about Ukraine as a failed state are nonsense. When people saw how Ukrainian mayors reacted to the damage, how much regional administrations were part of relief effort, nobody could say it’s not functional government”.
David Stulik, Senior Analyst and Head of the Eastern European Programme at the European Values Center for Security Policy:
“There cannot be any new security structure in Central Europe that would not include Ukraine. For us Ukraine is a part of our future security. Without Ukraine and its army we don’t even see the future. Now the Czech society has discovered Ukraine”.
Gerald Knaus, Founding chairman at European Stability Initiative (ESI):
Crisis of enlargement is not acknowledged by the EU. The Commission says we have a process, it is working. It is not working because there is no final goal linked to merit. Countries are like a hamster in a wheel: how fast you run, you will not get anywhere because some states tell us openly: we don’t want more members soon.
Key messages of the speakers from all sessions:
Session 4. “Russian war against Ukraine: implications for the EU accession process”.
Photo report of the Forum is available via link.
The Accession Exchange Forum is organized by the New Europe Center in partnership with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister of European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine, the International Renaissance Foundation, the Institute for European Policies and Reforms and the Soros Foundation in Georgia. The Accession Exchange Forum is taking place with EU support, within the EU-funded EU4USociety project implemented by the International Renaissance Foundation.
