Enlargement or Delusions of Grandeur? EU Grapples With Multiple Crises, but Bloc Expansion Plods Ahead

It seems that President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission has not quite internalized the hard fact of Brexit. If the United Kingdom’s formal liberation from the European Union and its bureaucratic constraints in January 2020 was a sign that the European Union’s future expansion would be fraught with problems, Ms. von der Leyen apparently missed the memo. Her new nominee for Enlargement Commissioner — that is an actual job title — Marta Kos, is already taking an assertive stance in respect of the anticipated expansion of the 27-member bloc. That is a little perplexing at a time when the European project is wrestling with crises on many fronts and multiple borders, that is more than a little perplexing.Confidence in European institutions is in free fall, as evidenced by a European Parliament that is disconnected from its constituents and that has yet to shake off a credibility crisis. Faith in often dogmatic EU policies isn’t faring much better. Recently the European Commission has been lauding its attempts to forge a unity pact on immigration while discontented member states like Italy bolt from the Brussels tangle. All this as purchasing power continues to shrink across the Continent. The solution for Europe’s top policymakers is to expand the bloc, which is a sort of inadvertent twist on the Peter principle, which says that institutions prompt employees to one level above their competence. Meantime, Ms. von der Leyen has been on a whistle stop tour of an alphabet soup of Balkan countries, part of an enlargement drive that Ms. Kos will be working to put into motion starting in November.North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro are all tipped to join the EU at some point — and that’s on top of Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. With Ukraine the challenges are obvious enough.In Georgia as with Ukraine, the biggest elephant in the Brussels living room is Russia. Following Saturday’s parliamentary elections in Georgia the ruling pro-Russian Georgian Dream party scored a landslide win against the four pro-Western opposition groups, pushing the country to a political crossroads.The pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, was heavily involved in consolidating a fractured opposition ahead of the vote but could now could potentially face impeachment — although the presidency is largely ceremonial.In the meantime, Brussels finds itself on the brink of entanglement in a distant crisis it is incapable of defusing — not that it hasn’t already tried. Earlier this month EU leaders warned the ruling Georgian Dream government not to reverse its pro-European course.Ms. von der Leyen, for her part, has made it clear that enlargement is high on her new term’s agenda and her expansion tsar is on the same page. Last week Ms. Kos stated that the procedures for enlargement “could possibly be adjusted and accelerated” and pledged to bring “as many countries as possible to a stage where they will be fully prepared to assume the obligations of the EU.”In major countries like France, expansion of the EU eastward is already sparking concern over things like factory relocations to countries where wages are significantly lower than in Western Europe. The French and German economies are already listing under chronic strain. This comes as the European Union announced some $2 billion in aid for Moldova — an obscure country caught up in tensions between Russia and the West and one of the poorest countries in Europe. Despite the Kremlin’s recent attempts to undermine a referendum in Moldova pertaining to the country’s EU membership, the referendum passed. To what extent the citizens of current EU member states such as Germany, Italy, and France will in the future sanction underwriting the economic “recovery” of countries on the margins of Continental consciousness is not at all clear, though. In the fulcrum states of the European project like France and Germany there are powerful political forces afoot that would break with Brussels at the earliest opportunity. These are also lively factions within the European Parliament, such as the recently formed Patriots for Europe, whose members tend to chafe at the tone-deaf language employed by the likes of the head of an EU entity called the European Economic and Social Committee, Oliver Röpke.Mr. Röpke joined Ms. von der Leyen on her Balkan tour and afterward stated that “a more integrated Europe is essential for the EU’s resilience against shared challenges like migration, economic instability, and climate change.”Disaffection with platitudes like those is feeding the showdowns looming in the capitals, as are possible revisions to some EU procedures. Ms. Kos is now questioning the so-called “requirement of unanimity” of the 27 member states, a prerequisite for any country’s entry into the bloc — for now. According to her statements, that stipulation can “slow things down if even a single member state opposes accession — which frequently happens, since this type decision-making falls under the national sovereignty of the said countries, which each defend their own interests.” A case in point is Hungary, where there is no consensus on admitting Ukraine to the EU. Just as significantly, France has a presidential election coming in two years’ time. The most powerful political party in the country right now is the far right National Rally, which even for those who might now call it center right is about as Eurosceptic a party as they come. For its founder, Marine Le Pen, and her young protégé, Jordan Bardella, France comes first, full stop, and the EU aspirants like Moldova and Georgia will remain far off the radar.

Enlargement or Delusions of Grandeur? EU Grapples With Multiple Crises, but Bloc Expansion Plods Ahead

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