Ukraine’s Membership Application As a Trigger to Reform the EU Enlargement Policy

ISSN 1019-3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022, Vol. 92, Suppl. 7, pp. S651–S659. © The Author(s), 2022. This article is an open access publication. Russian Text © The Author(s), 2022, published in Sovremennaya Evropa, 2022, No. 6. European Studies Ukraine’s Membership Application As a Trigger to Reform the EU Enlargement Policy N. Yu. Kaveshnikova,b,# aMoscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University), Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia Institute of Europe, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia e-mail: b Received May 6, 2022; revised August 28, 2022; accepted September 9, 2022 Abstract—The European Union’s successive enlargements had a qualitative impact on the nature of the integration organization, entailing changes in the agenda and priorities, institutions, and decision-making process and also changing the attitude of other international actors towards the European Union. The EU’s decision to grant candidate status to Ukraine reflects a fundamental change in the logic and goals of the enlargement policy and will have a strategic impact on the design of integration processes both within the EU and on its periphery. This article is devoted to two aspects of the ongoing changes: (1) the geopoliticization of the enlargement policy and (2) the further development of differentiation processes and the prospect for new forms of external differentiation (partial membership). Keywords: European Union, EU enlargement, Ukraine, geopolitics of enlargement, differentiated integration, partial membership DOI: 10.1134/S1019331622130032 The series of enlargements of the European Union has led to an increase in the number of member states, population, and the size of the union’s economy. In addition, these enlargements also entailed qualitative changes in the agenda and priorities of the Union, institutions and the decision-making process, and changed the attitude towards the European Union on the part of other international actors. It is no coincidence that Hiski Haukkala noted that “the successive rounds of enlargements have been a factor shaping the EU [Haukkala, 2011, p. 47]. From a similar position, Yuri Borko studied the complex relationship between the processes of expanding and deepening of integration [Borko, 2006]. The decision of the European Union to grant the status of a candidate country to Ukraine means a fundamental change in the logic and goal setting of the enlargement policy and will have a strategic impact on the design of integration processes both within the European Union and on its periphery. This article is devoted to the analysis of two aspects of the ongoing changes: (1) the geopoliticization of the enlargement policy and (2) the development of differentiation processes and the prospect for the emergence of new # Nikolai Yur’evich Kaveshnikov, Cand. Sci. (Polit.), is Head of the Department of Integration Processes at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) and a Leading Researcher at the RAS Institute of Europe. forms of external differentiated integration (partial membership). THE EU ENLARGEMENT POLICY: OVERVIEW Official rhetoric and foreign expert assessments [Smith, 2003; Vachudova, 2005] note that the policy of enlargement, at least until the end of the 2000s, was the most effective instrument of EU foreign policy. Historically, two goals of the EU enlargement strategy can be traced. Through enlargement, the European Union tried to fix the trend towards democratic transition in neighboring countries and thereby reduce the risk of “importing” instability. In particular, this logic appears to have underpinned the decision to start eastward enlargement, adopted in the early 1990s. Later, security stabilization became one of the elements in the preparation of the countries of the Western Balkans for EU membership and an important component of the European Neighborhood Policy/Eastern Partnership. However, since the early 1990s much more important was the strategy of the European Union projecting its norms and values, for which the enlargement policy provided a legitimate and effective toolkit. At the theoretical level, this was interpreted in terms of external Europeanization [Lavenex, 2004; Radaelli, 2003], S651 S652 KAVESHNIKOV political conditionality [Schimmelfennig and Scholtz, 2010], and normative [Manners, 2002] and transformational [Grabbe, 2006] EU power. From the point of view of the internal evolution of the European Union, the most important consequence of the enlargements of 1995, 2004, and 2007, in our opinion, was the development of elements of differentiated integration in the European Union. In the context of this article, it is especially important that during this period new formats of EU interaction with third countries developed, which can be interpreted as elements of external differentiated integration. Third countries accept the legislation, standards, and regulatory practices of the European Union, but receive neither the right to influence the formation of the acquis communautaire nor the right to participate in EU integration projects.1 As a reward for advancing along the path of reform, candidate countries and countries participating in the Eastern Partnership receive bonuses such as preferential trade regimes, visa-free regimes, etc., that is, more advanced forms of external interaction with the EU system, but not admission into the system. Such external differentiated integration is usually interpreted as either a set of different formats for EU interaction with third countries [Piris, 2016; Babynina, 2021; Gstöhl and Phinnemore, 2021] or the concept of concentric circles of external governance [De Neve, 2007; Kaveshnikov, 2011; Lavenex, 2011]. Since the late 2000s, the enlargement policy has stalled both in the geographical sense and in the sense of the transformation of the applicant countries.2 Until 2022, it was de facto limited to the region of the Western Balkans.3 Three reasons are usually given to explain this: the EU is tired of enlargement, the applicant countries are tired of waiting, and the influence of other actors (China, Russia). Thus, using the example of the Western Balkans, one can see the factors that determine the limits of the effectiveness of the conditionality and the transformational power of the EU [Elbasani, 2013; Kandel’, 2020]. In many respects, the situation in the Eastern Partnership countries appeared similar [Borzel and Langbein, 2013; Bazhan, 2015]. In addition, competition between the integration projects of the Eastern Partnership and the Eurasian Economic Union was growing in Eastern Europe, reflecting the growing geopolitical tensions 1 A few exceptions—the participation of Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein in the Schengen area and in the Single Internal Market—are due to historical specifics and the presence of the Nordic cooperation system, which unites countries (...truncated)