The European Union must speed up its years-long process of vetting countries before they can join the bloc, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said.
The future enlargement of the 27-state union was a geopolitical “imperative” in a shifting world and would make Europe stronger, said the head of the EU’s executive arm leading negotiations with candidate countries.
“We have to make the enlargement process faster and more credible. In other words, if a candidate country delivers on reform it has to move forward,” von der Leyen said on Friday.
The current merit-based process where countries eager to join the EU completed a sweeping range of structural reforms, and lined up their laws with the back catalogue of Brussels regulations, had to be predictable, the commission president said.
“When reforms are delivered, then progress on the path of accession to the European Union must follow,” she told a press conference.
The leaders of the EU’s institutions and national governments were in Tivat, on the coast of Montenegro, for a summit with the heads of state and governments of the western Balkan states, to discuss their winding path towards membership of the union.
Montenegro, a country of 620,000 people, is seen as the test case for whether the EU is serious about opening its doors to new members again.
Its government, which hosted the European leaders on Friday, hopes to close the final few “chapters” of accession negotiations in the coming months, as part of its ambition to become the 28th member state by 2028.
Montenegro’s speed in implementing the remaining reforms was impressive and the Balkan country was now “very close to the finish line,” von der Leyen said in Tivat.
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Countries hopeful of joining the European bloc have criticised a previous lack of urgency from Brussels, pointing to years where talks stalled. Croatia was the last country to join the EU in 2013.
The French and German governments floated a proposal that would see leaders and ministers from candidate countries regularly join parts of EU meetings in Brussels as “observers” without voting rights.
The Franco-German plan set out various ways prospective members could be gradually integrated into the EU decision-making process, as they made more and more progress on the wide ranging reforms that are the precondition of entry into the union.
The idea was sketched out in a paper shared with other governments on the eve of the Balkans summit.
The document, seen by The Irish Times, proposed greater involvement of candidate countries in EU schemes and the union’s single economic market during their journey towards full member state status.
“We must provide additional incentives as part of a merit-based, gradual integration process, streamline the current process to make it more efficient and to allow for faster and deeper integration into the EU,” the paper stated.
Albania’s prime minister Edi Rama said he was happy with a gradual process of integrating countries into the EU fold, but felt Europe should “find the guts” for another big moment, similar to the reunification of Germany under chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1990.
“When the [Berlin] Wall went down, the great guy [Kohl] didn’t say to the East Germans: ‘Now you have 35 chapters to go through before we are together.’ He said: ‘We are together and then we’ll help you go through’,” Rama said.
Albania is seen as another front-runner in the race for EU membership and hopes to be ready to join by 2030. “We should always be around the table, but everyone with its own status, until we become full members,” Rama said.