The EU is poised for a giant leap towards further integration

The cliche that European countries only unite in the face of imminent catastrophe is captured in Jean Monnet’s oft-quoted claim that “Europe will be made in crises, and it will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises”.

But that cliche belies the EU’s proven ability to pursue deeper integration as a deliberate, long-term political goal. Take the creation of the single market in the 1980s, the adoption of the euro in the 1990s, and the absorption of the ex-communist bloc in the 2000s. All of these tied Europe more closely together – not as desperate responses to acute crises, but as products of ambitious political choices to pool more national sovereignty. The achievements look even more remarkable when one considers how quickly they were fulfilled.

This bit of corrective history is worth keeping in mind when assessing the call, delivered by European Council president Charles Michel in a speech last week, to make the EU ready to accept new members as soon as 2030. Far from being an idle fantasy, the proposal is in fact the sort of move the EU has proved adept at making time and again.

Michel’s intervention does not by itself make the admission of new members any more likely. And it is not novel – foreign policy experts proposed a 2030 readiness target earlier this year. Michel is merely pushing on doors that are already being forced open by political necessity.

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By the end of this year, EU leaders must decide whether to open formal membership negotiations with Ukraine. It is inconceivable that they will decline to do so. Kyiv is doing its homework well enough that the European Commission will give it a positive assessment in an upcoming formal review. And Ukraine’s costly counteroffensive will pile political pressure on its EU allies – to either reward success with progress on its path to European integration, or not to add to its woes by blocking it. It is also now accepted that if Ukraine moves ahead, so must other would-be members, including countries in the western Balkans.

So the question is not whether negotiations will start, nor even how or when they will end, but how they will transform the bloc itself. Two debates are already stirring.

The first relates to the EU’s ability to make decisions if prospective members join, expanding the numbers from 27 towards the mid-30s. Both France and Germany have emphasised the need to reform decision-making before admitting new members. At times this has been seen as a way to kick enlargement into the long grass. But the brutal return of geopolitical thinking to centre stage in Europe means that enlargement is increasingly seen as unavoidable. Hence the growing intensity of serious thinking about reform.

A Franco-German working group kicked it off at the start of the year. In May, Germany’s foreign minister hosted a new “group of friends on qualified majority voting” in foreign and security policy, to replace current unanimity requirements. Even a country as traditionally sceptical of integration as Denmark attended as an observer – and its foreign minister has broken its previous taboo on more majority voting in the EU. There is talk of moving away from unanimity in other areas too, such as tax questions.

Against these appeals for more majority voting, Poland’s prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has argued that the many decisions taken since the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine prove that unanimity is not an obstacle to decisiveness. In addition, many capitals will be sympathetic to Michel’s point that unanimity is itself a political strength. Even the friends of majority voting recognise that safeguards are needed to respect key national interests.

The second debate is – inevitably in a multi-nation union – about money. Michel said publicly what many capitals are already admitting: that the next multiyear EU budget, for 2028-2034, will have to be drawn up for a possibly larger membership. That means that the budget talks, traditionally the most painful and exhausting moment in the bloc’s political cycle, will be even harder the next time round.

It is clear that if Ukraine or other candidates join, the redistribution key will favour the newer, poorer members. Many current net recipients will become net contributors, because today’s net payers will not accept simply upping their payments to cover the newcomers’ needs. But nor will they be able to resist the pressure for a bigger overall budget, especially given the imperative for more investments in common European priorities such as net-zero emissions, energy security and defence.

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Every seven-year budget round produces futile talk of greater funds in return for fundamental reform of how it is spent. This could be the time when the political conditions are propitious for turning such talk into action. The sheer weight of new priorities combined with enlargement could be what overcomes resistance to reprioritising old spending. And for the first time, there is a model – the post-pandemic recovery fund – for how to tie EU funds to politically agreed milestones and joint priorities, rather than simply handing money from rich to poor countries.

The past three years of crisis produced a more cohesive EU, as Monnet predicted. But that reactive unity may be nothing compared to the deliberate leap EU leaders are about to embark on for the rest of the decade. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023