April 30, 2025

A U.S. Strategy for Advancing EU Enlargement

By: Nicholas Lokker

In 2014, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker famously declared a pause in the European Union’s enlargement. This pause is now over, after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine spurred the bloc to fill geopolitical vacuums along its periphery. Abandoning former strategic ambiguity toward its Eastern neighborhood, the European Union has opened accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova and granted candidacy to Georgia. EU enlargement’s new momentum has spilled over into the Western Balkans, where Bosnia-Herzegovina has likewise received the green light for negotiations and North Macedonia and Albania have formally begun them.

As President Donald Trump’s second term kicks off, his administration has yet to lay out a clear position on the issue of EU enlargement.

There are currently ten officially recognized or potential candidates for EU membership (adding Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, and Türkiye to the above six). While their current progress toward joining the bloc ranges widely, all have nonetheless received an explicit promise of membership from the European Union. Yet daunting obstacles to enlargement remain. Both the European Union and accession countries must make difficult reforms. Unresolved conflicts in accession countries—most crucially the war in Ukraine—continue to block their EU paths, and these countries’ persistent economic and security vulnerabilities make progress along this path fragile.

Read the full article from The Washington Quarterly.

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