The European Union made one of its most consequential decisions since Russia invaded Ukraine this week. On Thursday, EU leaders agreed to open accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova and granted candidate status to Georgia. Ukraine’s membership remains potentially years away, and opening negotiations should not be confused with admitting the country into the Union. Yet the political significance is substantial. A state currently fighting a war partly over its geopolitical orientation has been formally moved another step towards integration with the European institutions Russia has spent years attempting to prevent it from joining. Enlargement has therefore become part of the strategic competition over what Europe’s political geography will look like after this war.
The mechanism through which the decision passed was almost as revealing as the decision itself. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had repeatedly opposed opening negotiations with Ukraine, arguing among other things that Ukraine had not satisfied the necessary conditions. When the European Council reached the decision, Orbán left the room, allowing the other 26 leaders to approve it without Hungary formally voting in favour. A few hours later, the limits of that workaround became obvious when Orbán blocked agreement on a €50 billion multiyear financial package for Ukraine. Europe therefore emerged from the summit simultaneously demonstrating extraordinary strategic unity and substantial institutional vulnerability.
That contradiction tells us something important about the European Union. It is powerful partly because twenty-seven sovereign states pool authority across trade, regulation, finance and foreign policy. The same structure makes decisive action difficult because those states retain vetoes in important areas. European integration therefore continuously trades national sovereignty against collective capacity. Giving every government a veto protects smaller states from domination by larger ones, but it also allows one government representing a small fraction of the EU’s population to block policies supported by almost everyone else.
Hungary demonstrates both sides of that arrangement. From Budapest’s perspective, unanimity protects Hungarian sovereignty and prevents France, Germany or a coalition of larger states from determining major foreign-policy decisions automatically. From everyone else’s perspective, Orbán can use that veto as bargaining leverage over unrelated disputes, including EU funds frozen because of concerns over Hungary’s rule-of-law standards. A safeguard designed to protect national autonomy can therefore become a mechanism through which one member extracts concessions from twenty-six others.
This is a holdout problem familiar from economics. Imagine twenty-seven landowners need to agree before infrastructure can cross their properties. Once twenty-six have agreed, the final owner knows their consent has become exceptionally valuable and can demand a much higher price. Unanimity gives every member similar strategic leverage. The more important the collective decision becomes, the more valuable the final veto becomes.
The EU has tolerated this partly because unanimity forces governments to construct unusually broad consensus before acting. That can increase legitimacy on issues involving sovereignty or foreign policy. The Ukraine war is testing whether the cost has become too high. A union attempting to behave as a geopolitical actor cannot always wait until every national government possesses identical preferences.
Yet abolishing vetoes is not an obvious solution. Smaller countries reasonably fear that qualified-majority voting on foreign policy could allow larger states to commit the Union to decisions they consider contrary to fundamental national interests. European integration works because states believe pooling sovereignty gives them more influence collectively than they lose individually. If smaller members begin believing the arrangement merely institutionalises the preferences of larger countries, the Union’s legitimacy weakens.
The institutional challenge is therefore designing collective action without creating collective domination.
Ukraine’s accession raises exactly the same problem on a much larger scale. The EU currently contains roughly 450 million people. Ukraine had more than 40 million citizens before the war and possesses enormous agricultural territory, significant reconstruction needs and substantially lower income per person than Western European members. Admitting Ukraine would therefore affect EU agricultural policy, regional development funds, budgets, migration and the internal distribution of political representation.
Membership is not simply a diplomatic reward for resisting Russia.
It is a permanent economic and constitutional relationship.
That is why the accession process traditionally involves extensive conditionality. Candidate countries need to adopt large portions of EU law, strengthen institutions, demonstrate functioning market economies and satisfy standards involving democracy and rule of law. The process is deliberately demanding because integration creates externalities across every member state.
If a country joins with weak courts, corruption does not remain entirely domestic because businesses from other EU countries depend on those courts to enforce European rules. If agricultural subsidies are poorly administered, taxpayers across the Union bear costs. If democratic institutions deteriorate after accession, EU decision-making itself can become more difficult.
Hungary demonstrates precisely why pre-accession institutional quality matters. The EU possesses considerable leverage over countries seeking membership because accession is valuable and can be withheld. Once a country becomes a member, influencing domestic institutions becomes harder because the new member acquires voting rights and potentially vetoes.
Conditionality therefore works most powerfully before entry.
This creates a temptation around Ukraine. Europeans understandably want to reward a country whose citizens are fighting and dying while explicitly identifying their future with Europe. Applying ordinary bureaucratic timelines can appear morally inadequate during an extraordinary war. Membership itself can also strengthen Ukraine strategically by demonstrating that Russia cannot determine its neighbours’ political orientation through military force.
But geopolitical urgency should not eliminate institutional standards.
If anything, Ukraine’s long-term success requires those standards more urgently because reconstruction will involve enormous amounts of public and international money. Strong procurement rules, independent courts, anti-corruption institutions and administrative capacity will determine whether reconstruction capital creates productive infrastructure or disappears into politically connected networks.
EU conditionality can therefore support Ukrainian reform rather than merely delay membership.
The mistake would be treating conditions as obstacles placed between Ukraine and Europe.
Properly designed, they are part of the process through which Ukraine becomes institutionally capable of benefiting fully from membership.
This is the commitment-device function of accession. Ukrainian governments can implement politically difficult reforms while telling domestic constituencies that the reforms are necessary for EU integration. External conditionality changes internal incentives.
Central and Eastern European countries experienced versions of this before the major 2004 enlargement. The prospect of membership encouraged reforms in competition policy, regulation, judicial institutions and public administration because governments knew accession depended on meeting European standards.
The reward made reform politically valuable.
Ukraine could experience the same mechanism.
The difference is that war dramatically changes both urgency and capacity. Ukraine is attempting institutional reform while simultaneously mobilising society for national survival. Government resources that would normally support administrative transformation are devoted to defence. Millions of citizens have been displaced. Infrastructure has been destroyed. Parts of the country remain occupied.
Expecting normal accession conditions under abnormal circumstances therefore creates another dilemma.
Lowering standards risks weakening the Union.
Maintaining every normal timetable risks making the accession promise politically meaningless.
The solution is probably sequencing rather than abandonment of conditionality. Negotiations can begin now, locking in the political direction, while actual membership remains dependent on reforms that necessarily take time.
That appears to be what this week’s decision accomplishes.
Opening negotiations is therefore best understood as a geopolitical commitment rather than immediate institutional integration.
The EU is telling Ukraine that if it satisfies the conditions, the destination exists.
That matters because one of Russia’s strategic objectives has been preventing Ukraine from consolidating permanently inside Western institutions. The decision communicates that invasion has not produced a Russian veto over Ukraine’s European orientation.
In that sense, enlargement becomes deterrence through institutional integration.
Military alliances deter through collective defence.
Economic and political unions can deter differently by raising the cost of coercing members and embedding countries inside networks of trade, law and finance.
The European Union’s greatest geopolitical achievement may actually be this quieter form of power. It transformed relationships among countries that fought repeated wars by making economic and legal integration more valuable than territorial competition.
That model worked particularly powerfully after the Cold War when Central and Eastern European states sought membership.
Russia interprets some of the same process very differently. From Moscow’s perspective, Western institutional expansion has progressively reduced Russian influence across states historically connected to it. NATO carries the obvious military dimension, while EU integration shifts regulation, trade and political institutions towards Brussels.
Understanding that Russian perception is necessary for analysing the conflict.
It does not give Russia a legitimate right to determine Ukraine’s political alignment through invasion.
This distinction between understanding security interests and accepting spheres of influence is essential. Great powers inevitably care about the foreign policies of neighbouring states. Recognising that fact does not mean smaller countries lose agency.
Ukraine’s desire for EU membership is itself a political preference expressed repeatedly through Ukrainian politics, most dramatically during the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests, which began after President Viktor Yanukovych abandoned plans for an association agreement with the EU.
European integration therefore cannot be reduced simply to Brussels expanding eastward.
Countries have actively sought entry.
That agency matters.
Moldova’s accession process reinforces the point. Moldova is not at war with Russia directly, but it faces Russian influence, the unresolved status of Transnistria and substantial economic vulnerabilities. Opening negotiations provides Chişinău with another institutional anchor towards Europe.
Georgia presents an even more complicated case. It has now received candidate status despite substantial concerns about political polarisation and democratic institutions. Russia occupies or supports separatist authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, territories internationally recognised as part of Georgia.
The EU is therefore extending political commitments across a region where unresolved conflicts intersect directly with Russian power.
Enlargement is becoming geopolitics whether Brussels prefers that language or not.
This creates consequences for the Union itself. Every additional member increases representation and economic scale while making consensus more difficult. If Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Western Balkan candidates eventually join, the EU could contain more than thirty states with even wider differences in income, strategic priorities and political institutions.
The scale-versus-cohesion trade-off from BRICS appears here too.
A larger EU has greater economic and geopolitical weight.
A larger EU also has more veto players.
The current conflict with Hungary therefore may be a preview of the institutional reforms enlargement requires. A Union of thirty-plus members cannot necessarily operate effectively using procedures designed for a much smaller organisation.
Budget rules, agricultural subsidies, voting weights and foreign-policy decision-making may all need reform before enlargement occurs.
This means accession is not only about candidate countries becoming ready for the EU.
The EU needs to become ready for candidate countries.
That distinction is frequently overlooked.
Brussels can demand reforms from Kyiv while postponing difficult reforms to its own institutions. Yet admitting a country as large and agriculturally significant as Ukraine without redesigning parts of the Common Agricultural Policy or budget could produce enormous distributional conflicts among existing members.
Polish farmers, French farmers and Ukrainian farmers will not experience enlargement identically.
Integration creates winners and losers even when aggregate benefits are positive.
Those distributional effects need to be addressed openly rather than hidden beneath geopolitical rhetoric.
Otherwise enthusiasm for Ukraine during war could turn into resistance once membership negotiations begin affecting subsidies, labour markets and budgets.
This is another time-horizon problem.
Supporting Ukraine symbolically today is politically easier than agreeing to redistribution associated with membership years from now.
Durable enlargement therefore requires converting wartime solidarity into institutional bargains capable of surviving after the emotional intensity of war fades.
Ukraine should want that process to remain demanding for another reason: membership obtained primarily through geopolitical sympathy could become politically fragile. If European voters later believe Ukraine entered without satisfying ordinary standards, enlargement sceptics could use every subsequent dispute as evidence that the decision was premature.
Conditionality can therefore protect the legitimacy of Ukrainian membership itself.
A difficult accession completed successfully creates stronger political foundations than an accelerated accession whose rules appear exceptional.
The objective should not be delay for its own sake.
It should be credibility.
This is why the phrase “opening accession negotiations” matters. It is simultaneously more significant and less dramatic than headlines suggesting Ukraine is joining the EU.
The door has moved from rhetorical possibility towards an institutional process.
Ukraine still has to walk through it.
The EU still has to rebuild parts of the doorway.
Hungary can still complicate every stage.
The war can still alter political conditions dramatically.
Nothing about membership is automatic.
That uncertainty does not make this week’s decision symbolic only.
Institutions often begin through expectations.
Businesses invest differently when they expect future access to the single market.
Governments reform differently when they expect compliance to produce membership.
Citizens make migration and education decisions based partly on where they believe their country is heading.
Geopolitical commitments can therefore create economic effects long before formal accession.
This is anticipatory integration.
The expectation of future membership begins changing behaviour before membership arrives.
That is part of the EU’s power.
Unlike an empire, it generally expands because governments request entry and accept extensive rules voluntarily in exchange for access to the benefits of membership.
The attraction of those benefits gives Brussels leverage.
The paradox is that every successful enlargement can weaken that leverage later because members become harder to discipline once inside.
Hungary demonstrates the problem.
Ukraine makes solving it more urgent.
The EU therefore faces a test much larger than whether it supports Kyiv. It has to prove that geopolitical enlargement can remain rules-based enlargement.
If it lowers standards whenever strategic urgency appears, the Union risks importing vulnerabilities that later become almost impossible to correct.
If it ignores geopolitical reality and treats accession as purely bureaucratic, it risks making its most powerful foreign-policy instrument irrelevant precisely when European security is being reordered.
The balance lies between them.
Open the process now.
Preserve the standards.
Reform the Union alongside the candidates.
Make the eventual commitment credible enough that both Ukraine and Russia understand the direction is real.
That is essentially what Europe attempted this week.
Orbán’s veto over the financial package demonstrates how difficult the next stages will be.
Twenty-six governments can agree on the strategic direction.
One government can still obstruct parts of the route.
That is both the strength and weakness of a union built from sovereign democracies.
Europe has told Ukraine that its future can lie inside the EU.
The next challenge is making sure the Union Ukraine eventually joins remains capable of functioning once it gets there.
