The EU’s Adaptive Logics of Enlargement: Moldova’s Experience Across Three Phases

This paper examines the European Union’s evolving approach to Moldova as a window into how EU enlargement policy adapts to shifting geopolitical contexts. While classical enlargement scholarship emphasizes the EU’s transformative logic using conditionality to promote democratic consolidation and institutional reform, Moldova’s three-decade relationship with the EU reveals a more complex pattern of adaptation. I theorize that EU policy toward Moldova has operated according to three distinct logics responding to different geopolitical imperatives. The transformative logic (1990s to early 2010s) pursued comprehensive institutional reform when threats stemmed primarily from weak state capacity. The stabilization logic (early 2010s to 2022) shifted toward maintaining regime cooperation despite democratic backsliding as state fragility concerns predominated. The demarcation logic (2022 to present), triggered by Russia’s Ukraine invasion, prioritizes geopolitical alignment over transformation, using candidate status to signal Moldova’s Western orientation against Russian influence. Through process tracing of EU-Moldova relations combining document analysis, funding data, and elite interviews in Brussels and Chișinău, I demonstrate how each logic creates distinct opportunity structures for Moldovan domestic actors: empowering civil society, strengthening incumbents, or incentivizing performative alignment. This framework reveals how the EU adapts existing policy instruments to geopolitical competition without wholesale institutional transformation.