Separating narratives: an analysis of the EU enlargement and defense policy in relation to Ukraine since 2022

The Russian invasion of Ukraine of 2022 has been the first military threat against Europe since the end of WWII. The EU response to the Russian aggression has impacted a large number of policy areas and led to a structural redefinition of the Union’s priorities and approaches. After less than six months following the beginning of the Russian invasion, Ukraine was granted the status of candidate country for accession, changing the long-standing paradigm “everything but institutions” that was put foreword by the time President of the EU Commission Romano Prodi in 2002. At the same time, the EU started supporting Ukraine in its war effort with more than 190 billion € spent up to date by the Union itself or its member states individually. Furthermore, on the 6th of March 2025, the EU approved an unprecedented defense-oriented plan, the ReARM Europe plan, which created the conditions for a 800 billion € spending in the military sector. A vast strand of literature has qualified the present EU as a geopolitical Union which is now concentrated on its strategic interests rather then on its normative nature. By starting from the assumption of this new EU posture, this paper aims at investigating the relation between the two most critical EU policies: EU defense and EU enlargement policies. By concentrating on narratives and discourse this paper has the objective of decoupling these two policies which, in the relation between the EU and Ukraine, have most often been discussed together, to understand and highlight commonalities and differences among the two. The use of the Narrative Policy Framework as a theoretical foundation will provide objective instruments to measure the converging or diverging patterns. Such analysis will concentrate on the meso-level perspective of the Narrative Policy Framework as it will be interested in undercovering the evolution and practices of EU narratives at a policy subsystem level. By considering official documents, statements and interviews to the key European leaders this paper expects to point out the inconsistencies and disagreements which might allow to separate, both from a practical and analytical point of view, the two policies. This paper expects to find a central role of Russia, identified as a threat or enemy, in the EU narrative. At the same time, Ukraine is expected to be presented, using the NPF terminology, as an “angel” in both the enlargement and defense policies. Diverging narratives between the two policies are expected to be found in the discourse of those key issues where states’ interests are touched.