Europe’s enlargement debate needs a timetable, not another summit

For more than twenty years, European leaders have told the countries of the Western Balkans that their future lies inside the Union. Since 2022 the same promise has been extended to Ukraine and Moldova, and in a more hesitant form to Georgia. The words have become familiar. What has never been offered is a timetable.

That omission is no longer a technicality. Enlargement without dates asks candidate governments to spend political capital on painful reforms while their opponents at home point out, with some justification, that the finish line keeps moving. It also lets member states postpone the harder conversation about how the Union itself must change to absorb new members.

The proposal now circulating among diplomats ahead of the December summit, a staged accession in which candidates join parts of the single market and selected EU programmes before gaining full voting rights, is a step in the right direction. On its own, though, it risks becoming another waiting room with better furniture.

Conditions both sides can be held to

A credible plan would pair each stage with a date and a short list of measurable conditions: judicial appointments made through transparent procedures, procurement rules aligned with EU law, regulators that survive a change of government. Candidates that meet them on time move forward. Those that do not are told precisely why.

The same discipline should apply to Brussels. If member states insist that the Union must reform its own decision-making before it grows, and many do, then that reform needs its own calendar. Otherwise internal reform becomes a convenient reason never to decide.

Enlargement without dates asks candidates to pay the price of reform up front and wait indefinitely for the reward.

Critics will say that dates create hostages to fortune. A government backslides, a war escalates, a referendum fails. All true. But a timetable can include review points and brakes; what it cannot be is vague. Vagueness has already cost the Union credibility in Skopje, Belgrade and Tirana, and it is costing it now in Chișinău and Kyiv.

What December should deliver

Leaders do not need to settle every question at one summit. They need to agree on the sequence: which parts of the single market open first, which funds become available at each stage, and when the debate on institutional reform must conclude. A short, public roadmap would do more for the Union’s standing in its neighbourhood than another set of warm conclusions.

The alternative is familiar. Candidates drift, outside powers fill the gap, and the next generation of reformers concludes that the European promise was always rhetorical. Europe has the tools to avoid that outcome. It has run out of reasons not to use them.