“Are We All in the Same Boat?” The Perception of Other EU Candidate Countries in Ukraine

The full-scale Russia’s war against Ukraine gave a significant push to the renewal of EU enlargement policy. Not only Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia were one by one granted a candidate status, but the enlargement of the Western Balkans countries gained a new momentum. It is often argued that there should be a harmonisation of the accession and negotiation processes in all candidate countries. But is such a notion supported by the local experts and general public in the candidate countries? We argue either to really work together with other candidate countries on the accession, or even just to answer this question one should look deeply into the sentiments and attitudes towards other candidate countries. In our paper we look at the case of Ukraine and Ukrainians’ perception and sentiments towards other candidate countries (Moldova, Georgia, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina) as fellows undergoing the same challenge. To address this, we combine quantitative and qualitative methods and draw on the data from expert interviews and focus group discussions with citizens as well as on the recent representative general surveys conducted in Ukraine regarding the sentiments and perceptions towards EU enlargement policies and other candidate countries. Our data allows us to compare the attitudes towards different candidate countries based on their positions towards Ukraine and Russia after the full-scale invasion. We also argue that not only the countries support of Ukraine in the ongoing war, but also the perception of them as inherently democratic or “European” are reflected in the Ukrainians’ perceptions and sentiments towards them. We conclude, that understanding of the local sentiments in candidate countries towards fellow EU candidates would improve the EU accession negotiations for all of them and will contribute to perception of the EU as responsive to local context. Keywords: EU enlargement policy, candidate countries, EU accession negotiations, public opinion, perceptions and sentiments