Challenges to Geopolitically-Affected Europeanization in Moldova and Ukraine

Abstract

Europeanization beyond the EU’s borders has acquired renewed salience following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which transformed EU enlargement from a largely procedural and technocratic process into a geopolitically driven strategy of risk management and boundary-making. Recent scholarship shows that the EU has revived enlargement primarily as a response to war, systemic insecurity, and great-power competition, while remaining constrained in its capacity and willingness to deliver rapid accession (Anghel 2025; Anghel and Dzankic 2023; Scicluna 2025). Moldova and Ukraine have thus emerged as critical cases for analyzing European integration under conditions where geopolitical urgency, institutional constraints, and democratic transformation intersect. A first core issue addressed by this panel is the use of incomplete enlargement as a geopolitical risk-management instrument. Studies highlight that the EU increasingly relies on partial, gradual, and differentiated forms of integration—candidate status, sectoral alignment, political association, and security cooperation—to stabilize its eastern neighborhood and deter rival influence without fully committing to membership in the short term (Karjalainen 2023; Ghincea and Plesca 2025). At the same time, research on EU strategic autonomy suggests that geopolitical shocks do not automatically translate into deepened or consolidated integration, but rather produce incremental, uneven, and politically constrained advances, shaped by divergent national preferences within the EU itself (Michaels and Sus 2024). In this context, the panel explores whether such arrangements can sustain long-term Europeanization in Ukraine and Moldova, or whether they institutionalize prolonged “in-between” statuses that undermine reform incentives and EU credibility (Scicluna 2025). Second, the panel addresses the interrelations between different dimensions and discourses of integration, particularly the correspondence and tensions between security-oriented and democracy-building considerations. The war has elevated security logics within EU enlargement discourse. At the same time, democracy, rule of law, and state-building remain formally central to enlargement governance, even as their practical prioritization becomes increasingly contested. The panel investigates whether these dimensions reinforce one another or generate trade-offs, and how discursive shifts reshape integration priorities and outcomes. Third, the panel foregrounds the ideational and implementational agency of local actors in constructing foreign-policy identities and strategic perceptions as a constitutive dimension of European integration. Moving beyond EU-centric and conditionality-focused approaches, recent work emphasizes that enlargement and Europeanization are co-produced processes, in which candidate-state actors actively interpret, narrate, and reshape the meaning of integration itself. Under wartime conditions, Ukraine and Moldova have become sites of accelerated foreign-policy identity formation, where integration with the EU is framed not only as institutional compliance, but as a redefinition of national interests, geopolitical belonging, and threat perceptions. This panel takes Moldova and Ukraine as analytically rich cases of Europeanization under geopolitical stress. Various contributions of this panel take their engagement with Europeanization and European integration separately, compare their experience with each other or with another countries trying to move closer to the EU. Different angles of analysis are helpful in elucidation multidimensional understanding of integration as a process shaped by geopolitical strategy, local agency, and identity construction under conditions of war.

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