The EU imagines expanding to include as many as 35 member states

When EU leaders met in Brussels for a summit last week, perhaps the most significant discussion did not take place at their headquarters, but secretly on the sidelines over coffee and croissants at a Brussels hotel.

The leaders of Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Romania, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden gathered for a breakfast meeting at the Hotel Amigo, where several were staying, to consider how to expand the EU’s ranks to as many as 35 member states.

After being politically moribund for years, the idea of enlargement has been dramatically revived by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and membership is now under serious consideration not just for Kyiv and its neighbour Moldova, but for those who were in the queue earlier, the western Balkan states.

It’s now being openly discussed that this means reconsidering how the EU should work from the ground up, including payments to farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy, national vetoes, and the representation of member states in the European Commission.

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We need to speak about the commission, we need to speak about the seats in the European Parliament... what we need to answer in the coming years is what kind of European Union we want

—  Pedro Sánchez, Spanish prime minister

“Enlargement is on the table, this is true, and of course there will be a debate on the institutional reform, the resources, the Common Agricultural Policy, the cohesion funds, and so on,” Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who attended the meeting, told journalists this week.

“We need to speak about the commission, we need to speak about the seats in the European Parliament... what we need to answer in the coming years is what kind of European Union we want.”

Standing beside him, commission president Ursula von der Leyen said enlargement would mean considering “how the decision-making process will look” and “how the common funding that we have will be allocated”.

“Let’s look forward for years and try to imagine what Europe will look like. Can we imagine the European Union will be without Ukraine, without Moldova, without the western Balkans, and those parts of Europe are under the influence of Russia or China? Impossible,” she said.

Farming dilemma

Ask an Irish Government minister and they will tell you that Ireland has long been one of the a staunchest supporters of enlarging the EU.

“It has really transformed our country and has been a huge catalyst for good,” Minister of State for European Affairs Peter Burke said last week. “We want to give [potential new entrants] that chance too.”

The discussion is now starting about what the trade-offs of enlargement might really involve.

[ ‘This year is for decisions’: Ukraine pushes for Nato and EU membership ]

[ Tony Connelly: When will Ukraine join the EU – and how is Ireland helping the cause? ]

Admitting Ukraine, an agricultural behemoth that before its invasion was the main supplier of various food staples to large regions of the world, would be expected to have profound implications for the Common Agricultural Policy.

The Cap doles out payments to farmers based on the amount of land they farm, and accounts for the single biggest item of expenditure in the EU’s budget, roughly one third of its entire expenditure.

“If these guys come in, can we maintain the same level of support? It will cost a lot,” one official mused.

Admitting countries that are much poorer than existing EU states would have a profound effect on the general budget, transforming many current net recipients into net contributors

One possibility could be to ”phase in” the inclusion of new member states to the Cap. But there are also ideas for more ambitious reform. As it stands, countries such as Germany are seen as favouring a major reform of the Cap away from payments that are based on the size of land, towards some other metric. Enlargement could be a catalyst for this debate.

Admitting countries that are much poorer than existing EU states would also have a profound effect on the general budget, transforming many current net recipients into net contributors.

Poland’s decision to abruptly shut its borders to Ukrainian agricultural imports earlier this year was seen as an example ofhow even the biggest supporters of Ukraine can abruptly U-turn on their policies when their self-interest is threatened.

In the wake of the invasion, the EU lifted most tariffs on imports from Ukraine to help its economy through the war.

Polish farmers protested that a flood of Ukrainian food imports was devastating their income, leading Poland and others to unliterally shut their borders to agricultural goods.

The European Commission had to intervene to broker a deal to prevent the sale of Ukrainian wheat, maize, and sunflower seed in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, in order to persuade them to continue to allow the goods to transit their territory and avoid contributing to a world hunger crunch caused by Ukraine’s struggle to export food.

New referendums ahead?

A major reason why appetite for further expanding the EU faded in recent years was disillusionment in western Europe towards democratic backsliding in Poland and Hungary and their use of vetoes to prevent EU agreements, particularly by Budapest.

This is seen by many member states as an issue that would need to be addressed before any more join, potentially by reducing the number of topics for which unanimous agreement is required for a decision.

In May, a group of nine member states – Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain – made an open appeal to scrap the required unanimity for the EU’s foreign policy decisions and move to qualified majority voting, to allow the EU to speak with a clearer international voice.

At the time, Tánaiste Micheál Martin said he was “open” to reforms. “If we enlarge the European Union, which I think we should do, that will entail changes on the system of making governance work more smoothly,” he said.

It’s no secret that some member states would also like to drop the requirement for unanimity in matters of taxation, though this has less support, and Ireland can be counted on as an EU member that would block any such proposal.

Enlargement has also revived the idea that there should be fewer members of the European Commission than there are member states.

Since the EU added 10 new members in 2004, some countries feel that having a commissioner per country has meant there are more commissioners than there are genuine jobs in the commission.

The Treaty of Lisbon was originally meant to reduce the number of commissioners to two-thirds of member states, meaning that positions would rotate.

But Ireland’s rejection of the treaty in a referendum in 2008 killed off the idea, as worries about not having a commissioner were seen as a key reason for the No vote. The plan was scrapped as a concession to Irish voters.

However, some countries see a 35-member commission as downright unmanageable.

“Thirty-five commissioners would be too big – you’d have to keep inventing jobs,” one official said. One suggestion is that smaller countries could club together, for example to have one ”Baltic commissioner”, but even supporters admit the idea is a hard sell.

Partly due to Ireland’s previous rejection of EU treaties, national referendums on EU topics have a reputation of being unpredictable and fraught, and policymakers around the continent dread the idea of future plebiscites.

The difficulty of reform

Last week there was an illustration of how challenging any reform would be.

At a meeting in Luxembourg, European affairs ministers met to consider ideas proposed by the European Parliament that next year’s elections in June should be held on a single date across the continent.

The parliament had also proposed that voters should be able to vote for transnational party lists, essentially to be able to vote for MEPs beyond their own country, an idea that was recommended by the Conference on the Future of Europe, a citizens’ consultation.

The governments shot down the proposals without fanfare.

In a publicly broadcast part of the meeting, Peter Burke, the Minister of State for European Affairs, conveyed Ireland’s “concerns” about the package to his counterparts, saying that the Oireachtas had raised questions about potential EU overreach and the importance of keeping decision-making close to citizens. Questions of voting age and election dates “are a national competence and should remain so”, he argued.

“The ministers killed this reform,” one official put it. “The power to set the date of the election is a political tool they don’t want to lose.”

While Ukraine is largely responsible for putting enlargement back on the table, EU members believe it should not be allowed to ‘skip the queue’ ahead of western Balkan countries such as Albania and North Macedonia

It’s a reflection of how serious EU countries have become about advancing Ukraine’s membership hopes that they are willing to contemplate discussion of such contentious issues.

The invasion made the case in favour of keeping neighbouring European countries on the track to EU integration: aspiring towards prosperity, democratic norms and the rule of law, while deepening relations with Brussels instead of with the world’s authoritarian powers.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is pushing for membership negotiations to start as soon as possible, even this year.

While Ukraine is largely responsible for putting enlargement back on the table, EU members believe it should not be allowed to ”skip the queue” ahead of western Balkan countries such as Albania and North Macedonia.

The latter went as far as changing its name to resolve a dispute with Greece and help its membership prospects, and has been waiting for accession negotiations to start since 2009. Officials fear overlooking such countries would cause a backlash that could discredit the EU membership process itself, sending the message that all reform efforts are in vain.

It was easy for Ireland to be a staunch support of enlargement when there was no prospect of it happening. Now that these discussions are beginning, it will need to consider what welcoming new members to the EU would really mean.