EU Enlargement as a Geopolitical Fantasy of Identity Closure

This paper reconceptualizes European Union enlargement as a geopolitical fantasy structured by the logic of desire and the pursuit of identity closure. Moving beyond dominant technocratic and normative accounts, it argues that enlargement operates not merely as an institutional or legal process but as a fantasmatic mechanism through which the EU seeks to stabilize an inherently incomplete collective identity. Enlargement functions as a promise of wholeness, of a Europe that can finally coincide with itself, yet one that can never be fully realized. Drawing on critical geopolitics, post-structural theories of identity, and recent work on the object-cause of desire in international politics, the paper conceptualizes enlargement as a privileged signifier that embodies the fantasy of identity closure while perpetually deferring its attainment. In this reading, enlargement functions analogously to the Lacanian object-cause of desire: it is not a concrete goal whose realization would resolve Europe’s identity anxieties, but a symbolic object that sustains desire precisely because it remains elusive. Its political effectiveness lies in the fact that EU identity closure is structurally out of reach. The paper illustrates this argument through the case of the Western Balkans, whose prolonged and seemingly never-ending accession process exemplifies the fantasmatic logic of enlargement. The Western Balkans occupy a paradoxical position within EU geopolitical imagination: they are repeatedly affirmed as unquestionably European and future members, while simultaneously being framed as perpetually unready, deficient or incomplete. This temporal suspension sustains the desire for enlargement without delivering its closure, allowing the EU to preserve the fantasy that its identity could be completed through eventual inclusion, while deferring the moment when such completion would inevitably fail. From this perspective, enlargement conditionality and reform benchmarks operate less as objective criteria than as floating signifiers that can be rearticulated to maintain the desirability of accession. The Western Balkans thus function as a site onto which the EU displaces its anxieties about borders, cohesion, and geopolitical relevance, transforming enlargement into a mechanism for managing lack rather than overcoming it. Enlargement remains meaningful not despite its incompletion, but because of it. By theorizing EU enlargement as a fantasy-driven geopolitical practice and situating the Western Balkans as an illustrative case, the paper makes two core contributions. First, through challenging narratives of enlargement as linear progress, it foregrounds the affective and fantasmatic dimensions of EU geopolitics. Second, it demonstrates that the crisis of EU enlargement is less a failure of candidates to meet objective criteria than a symptom of the EU’s constitutive identity lack. Ultimately, the paper argues that the geopolitical power of enlargement derives from its capacity to promise an identity closure that must never fully arrive, always threatened by an external Other.