There is a room in Brussels where the future borders of Europe are, in a practical sense, decided.

It is not a dramatic room. It is a conference room in the European Commission, staffed by officials who spend their careers reading legal texts, monitoring legislation, and writing assessment reports about countries that want to join the European Union. The process they manage is called accession. It is the most thorough institutional transformation a country can voluntarily undertake.

It is also, by almost any measure, extraordinarily slow.

Turkey applied for EU membership in 1987. Montenegro began accession negotiations in 2012. Ukraine submitted its application in February 2022 — the same week Russia invaded. None of them are members yet. The fastest accession in EU history, Finland's, took three years. The slowest ongoing process has been running for nearly four decades.

Understanding why enlargement works this way — and why it matters despite its pace — is essential to understanding how Europe thinks about itself.

The formal accession process begins when a country submits an application to join the European Union. The Commission then issues an opinion on whether the applicant is ready to begin negotiations — a stage that can itself take years.

If the opinion is positive and member states agree, the country is granted candidate status. Negotiations then begin on thirty-five separate chapters covering every area of EU law: the single market, competition policy, agriculture, justice and home affairs, environment, social policy, and more. Each chapter must be opened, negotiated, and closed before accession can proceed.

The chapters are not simply boxes to tick. Each one requires the candidate country to adopt, implement, and demonstrate enforcement of the relevant EU legislation. For countries with weak institutions, unreformed judiciaries, or significant corruption problems, meeting the requirements is genuinely transformative — and genuinely difficult.

The entire process is overseen by the Commission, which publishes annual progress reports on each candidate country. These reports assess not only whether laws have been passed but whether they are actually enforced. A country can transpose an EU directive into national law on paper and still fail the chapter if its courts are not applying it or its bureaucracy is not implementing it.

At the end of the process — if all chapters are closed, all conditions met, and member states unanimously agree — the accession treaty is signed and ratified. The country becomes a member.

The Accession Process: Key Stages

1. Application submitted to the Council of the EU

2. Commission opinion on readiness to negotiate

3. Candidate status granted (requires unanimous member state agreement)

4. Accession negotiations opened: 35 chapters of EU law

5. Each chapter negotiated and closed

6. Accession treaty signed and ratified by all current member states

7. Membership

The conditions a country must meet to join the EU were formalised at a European Council summit in Copenhagen in 1993, and are known as the Copenhagen Criteria.

They require three things: stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for minorities; a functioning market economy capable of competing within the EU; and the ability to take on the obligations of membership, including adherence to EU law.

These criteria sound procedural. In practice, they describe a comprehensive political and economic transformation. Countries joining the EU from Central and Eastern Europe in 2004 and 2007 had to reform their judiciaries, liberalise their economies, harmonise their regulations with tens of thousands of pages of EU legislation, and demonstrate that their state institutions could function within a supranational legal order.

The transformative power of this process — sometimes called the EU's transformative leverage — is one of the most analysed phenomena in European studies. Countries that might otherwise have struggled to consolidate democracy or market institutions after communism were pulled in a particular direction by the prospect of membership. The accession process gave reformers a concrete external anchor for changes that would otherwise have faced domestic resistance.

Whether that leverage still operates as effectively for countries that have been candidates for decades, with membership still not in sight, is a more uncomfortable question.

For most of the 2010s, EU enlargement was largely stalled. The Western Balkans had been promised membership since the Thessaloniki summit of 2003, but progress was slow, the process had lost momentum, and several member states were openly sceptical about further expansion.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed the political calculation.

Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia submitted membership applications within days of the invasion. The EU granted Ukraine and Moldova candidate status in June 2022 — an unusually fast decision that reflected the political urgency of the moment rather than a technical assessment of readiness. Ukraine formally opened accession negotiations in 2024.

The strategic logic was clear: anchoring Ukraine in the EU accession process was a way of signalling that Russia's invasion would not determine Ukraine's political future. It was also a long-term commitment of enormous complexity and cost. Ukraine is a country of forty million people with a large agricultural sector, significant industrial capacity, and institutions that were undergoing reform before the war disrupted everything. Integrating it into the EU — particularly its agricultural markets, where Ukrainian grain competes directly with Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian farmers — will require difficult negotiations within the EU as much as between the EU and Ukraine.

The accession timeline, in any realistic assessment, runs to the mid-2030s at the earliest. Which means Ukraine's EU membership will be negotiated through years of war, reconstruction, and political change that no one can currently predict.

The most common misreading is to treat enlargement as a reward for good behaviour — a gold star that the EU hands out when a country has passed its exams.

It is more complicated than that. Enlargement is a political decision taken by current member states, each of which has a veto. A country can meet all the technical conditions and still find its accession blocked because one member state has a bilateral dispute with it, or because the political mood in Europe has shifted against expansion, or because existing members calculate that the costs of admitting a new country outweigh the benefits.

North Macedonia changed its constitutional name — from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to North Macedonia — as a condition of resolving a two-decade dispute with Greece and opening its path to EU membership. It has been a candidate since 2005. It is still not a member.

This gap between the technical process and the political reality is one of the EU's persistent credibility problems in the Western Balkans. Countries that have been reforming for twenty years, watching other candidates advance ahead of them, develop a form of accession fatigue that can reverse the very reforms the process was designed to entrench.

Enlargement is the EU's most powerful foreign policy tool — and its most consistently mismanaged one.

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