Inflection point or path not taken? Assessing the impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine on EU enlargement policy

Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, took the EU by surprise. Despite a years-long pattern of Russian aggression towards its neighbour, including the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Europe’s leaders were not prepared for either the scale or brutality of the war, which is now close to entering its fourth year. And while the EU was not able to prevent the conflict and so far remains unable to help end it, the war has had a transformative effect on many areas of policy, including enlargement. Indeed, enlargement has very much re-emerged as an EU priority since 2022 - both in relation to Ukraine, which, alongside Moldova, had its candidacy accepted in June 2022 (followed by Georgia in December 2023) and in relation to the longstanding candidates of the Western Balkans. Moreover, particularly in the rhetoric of the Commission, the geopolitical dimension of enlargement has been very much emphasised. That is, enlargement has been presented, first and foremost, as imperative to the EU’s security in a volatile neighbourhood. Nevertheless, there remains a significant gap between European leaders’ rhetorical commitment to further enlargement and concrete progress towards that goal. There are many reasons for this gap, one of which is the apparent disjuncture in perceptions and priorities between the Commission and other key stakeholders in the accession process, including national governments and European political parties. With these considerations in mind, this paper addresses the following question: To what extent does the Russian war in Ukraine mark an inflection point in the discursive framing of the EU’s enlargement policy? In particular, the article focuses on two sites of discursive framing of EU enlargement: (1) In the public statements of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and (2) in the discourse of the European Parliament (EP). Thus, in addition to providing insights into how key EU actors frame enlargement and how the dominant frames have shifted in response to the war, the paper also probes the inter-institutional dynamics that contribute to the shaping of enlargement policy. The paper will proceed as follows. The first section will give an overview of the state of the EU’s enlargement policy. This will be followed by an explication of the paper’s methodology and data set. Enlargement discourse is coded as falling into one of five frames - geopolitical/security, economic, values/norms, institutionalist/internal reformist, and procedural - each of which has a positive, negative, and neutral dimension. The data set spans the period 2019-2024, enabling an analysis of shifts in salience, prevalence of discursive frames, and valence of attitudes towards enlargement before and after the Russian invasion. Two sections then present the study’s results - the first discussing the discursive framing of enlargement in the public pronouncements of Commission President von der Leyen and the second outlining the discursive framing of enlargement in the European Parliament. The penultimate section sets out the study’s implications for the future of enlargement policy and the final section concludes.