Finding Europe’s Eastern Frontier: Ukraine and the EU’s capability-expectations gap

Europe’s future is being decided in the east. The full-blown invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 presents the most serious challenge to the European project. From the outset, the European Union has been based on an ideal of peaceful co-operation — a guiding ideology that proved spectacularly successful within the EU borders, but far less so in relation to Russia. Like the cold war before 1989, the war in Ukraine is bound to determine the ultimate limits of European integration for decades to come. A clearly defined presence of an external enemy — Vladimir Putin’s Russia — might spur the nations of Europe to redouble their efforts towards an ‘ever-closer union’. Yet, as the war follows on the heels of a long decade of crises, it is equally possible that it will end up reinforcing tendencies towards fragmentation. In the first few months after the outbreak of the war, the past sources of internal EU divisions — the crises of eurozone, migration and the rule of law — appeared to be overshadowed by the conflict. Yet, not only did Russia’s invasion of Ukraine do little to remove these challenges, it will likely make them even more intractable. The most pressing immediate challenge for the EU is its ability to accept Ukraine as a full member. This paper will address the tension between the EU’s rhetorical commitments to Ukraine and the internal constraints its polity faces in living up to these commitments. Enlargement is the EU’s most successful foreign policy. But it is also a source of existential angst. So much of the question of what the EU is, what it can be, and what it ought to be, is bound up in the question of where its final borders lie. The Russian invasion of Ukraine vividly illustrates the urgency of debates over the EU’s eastern frontier. It also illustrates the impossibility of resolving them. The war precipitated Ukraine’s rapid acceptance as a candidate for EU membership. Ukraine submitted its application on 28 February 2022, just four days after the invasion. It was granted candidate status a mere four months later, having received the Commission’s recommendation and endorsement from the European Parliament and European Council. Such speed is unheard of for what is a very bureaucratic procedure. But this apparent decisiveness brings with it new challenges. One set of problems concerns the signal sent to would-be members who have been languishing in the candidature queue for decades with very little progress. Another concerns the fact that most EU leaders consider Ukraine’s prospects of actually joining the bloc rather remote. Both raise the spectre of the Union’s longstanding ‘capability-expectations gap’ (Hill 1993).