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Beyond external incentives : the European Union, wartime enlargement and the candidate countries in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans
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0021-9886; 1468-5965
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JCMS-Journal of common market studies, 2025, OnlineFirst
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MESAROVICH, Alexander, SCHUMACHER, Tobias, Beyond external incentives : the European Union, wartime enlargement and the candidate countries in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, JCMS-Journal of common market studies, 2025, OnlineFirst - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/93695
Abstract
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 marked a rupture in many regards. Moscow's brutal assault represents the most comprehensive attempt in post-World War II Europe to change internationally recognised borders by force, violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of an independent state, and, as such, the established international legal order. It also had the rather unexpected effect – at least until the re-election of Donald Trump as US President in late 2024 – of countering the alleged ‘decline of the West’ (Marquand, 2012), which was considered too triumphalist and, at the same time, too debilitated and fragmented to defend the very values it was built upon. The European Union (EU), an integral part of the liberal world order's governance structure, was long seen to be engaged in a ‘struggle against global irrelevance’ (Youngs, 2010) and poised to witness its ‘coming erosion’ (Walt, 2011). Arguably, no other policy represented the EU's inability to advance its own raison d'être and the process of European integration more strikingly than its enlargement policy post-2004/2007. Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, EU enlargement was noted more for its failure and observed more in rhetoric than in practice, mainly because of member states' unwillingness to pursue much needed treaty changes and their disagreement over the ‘how’, the ‘when’ and the ‘who’ of a potential EU ‘widening’.
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Published online: 05 August 2025
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UK Research and Innovation, 10040721
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This article benefitted from support provided by the Horizon Europe REDEMOS project, grant number 10040721.