Nargiza Matqurbanova
For most of the 2010s, EU enlargement was the policy area everyone in Brussels quietly agreed to stop taking seriously. Montenegro opened accession talks in 2010, Serbia in 2012, and both then spent a decade watching chapters open and stall while French and Dutch voters made clear they had no appetite for a bigger Union.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and enlargement went, almost overnight, from a dormant technical exercise to the central instrument of European security policy. That shift has been good for momentum and bad for the rulebook, and the tension between the two is now the real story of Europe’s strategic outlook.
The numbers tell the story of the acceleration. Ukraine applied for membership four days after the 2022 invasion and received candidate status within four months, a speed with no precedent in the history of enlargement. By June 2026, Ukraine had opened its first negotiating cluster, and in July it opened a second, covering external relations and defense policy, ending a two-year deadlock that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán had single-handedly enforced through his veto.
The European Commission now floats 2028 as a plausible date for admitting new members; Kyiv is pushing for 2027. Compare that to Montenegro, the current frontrunner among the Western Balkan states, which has spent sixteen years working through the process and only in 2026 finished opening all thirty-three negotiating chapters.
That contrast is exactly the problem. Diplomats and officials from the Western Balkans have not been shy about naming it. Kosovo’s deputy prime minister has publicly framed enlargement as a “strategic necessity” precisely because Russian influence in the region has not gone away simply because Brussels’ attention shifted east. Luxembourg’s foreign minister, meanwhile, has warned that the rules cannot bend for Kyiv without an explanation owed to the countries that applied first.
Both statements are correct, and both point to the same underlying fact: enlargement is no longer, if it ever fully was, a technocratic reward for reform. It has become a tool of geopolitical containment, and Ukraine is the test case for how far that tool can be stretched before it breaks something else.
The proposed fix, floated by the European Commission and echoed in a notable intervention by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz proposing a form of “associate membership” for Ukraine, is what officials are calling “phased” or “associate” membership: a form of partial integration that would give Ukraine market access, funding, and a seat at the table well before full accession, deferring the hardest questions about voting rights and institutional weight.
The appeal is obvious. It lets the EU demonstrate commitment to Kyiv without forcing a premature vote on full membership for a country still at war, still fighting entrenched corruption, and still, by the Commission’s own assessment, short on the administrative capacity that full accession requires.
The danger is just as obvious. EU treaties do not currently permit a durable second tier of membership with reduced rights, and any workaround risks becoming the template rather than the exception, particularly for a Western Balkan region that has already watched the goalposts move once, in the 2010s, when enlargement fatigue set in for reasons that had little to do with the region’s own performance.
There is a more optimistic reading available, and it is not merely wishful. Fast-tracked accession for Ukraine and Moldova has, if anything, dragged the Balkan file back onto the agenda after years of neglect. Montenegro’s accelerated timetable, the extension of roam-like-at-home pricing to the region, and the €6 billion Growth Plan adopted for the Western Balkans in 2023 are all downstream of the same geopolitical urgency driving Ukraine’s case.
Seen this way, Kyiv’s war has not stolen the Balkans’ place in line so much as reopened a line that had effectively stopped moving. Montenegro’s government has been explicit about this framing, describing the 2026 EU-Western Balkans summit in Tivat as proof that the region’s future is “truly within reach” rather than a casualty of Ukraine’s urgency.
Both readings can be true at once, which is precisely what makes the coming two years consequential. If the EU manages to build genuine, tiered integration mechanisms that apply consistently across candidates, including a resolution to the Kosovo recognition impasse that has left five member states refusing to acknowledge its statehood, enlargement could become the strategic asset Brussels wants it to be: a way of anchoring an entire arc of countries, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, against Russian revisionism.
If instead Ukraine’s accession is negotiated as a special, self-contained exception, the Balkans have every reason to conclude that the rules were always negotiable for some applicants and immovable for others. Europe’s strategic outlook, in other words, will be decided less by how quickly Ukraine joins than by whether the EU can prove that speed for one candidate does not mean patience is punished for the rest.
Nargiza Matqurbanova, 3rd year student at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy, majoring International Law
