Enlarging, Fast and Slow: European Integration under a Security Imperative

EU Eastern enlargement generated a vibrant research agenda, theorizing and analysing the enlargement rationales and conditions of the EU (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005a; Schneider, 2009) and the “Europeanisation” effects on the accession countries (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005b; Vachudova, 2005). This line of work has stagnated together with EU enlargement. The revived enlargement process generates new research that this workshop aims to bring together and into conversation. Yet this round of enlargement takes place in a fundamentally changed environment characterised, inter alia, by geopolitical rivalry and the ascendance of the nationalist right – but also in an EU that has undergone major crisis-driven capacity building. This context calls for novel theoretical and empirical accounts. The EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine affects the organisation’s politics, governance structure, and agenda for resource distribution. For one, it is intertwined with the major political divides structuring EU politics (Bélanger and Schimmelfennig, 2021; Wunsch and Bélanger, 2023). In addition, the accession process changes the distribution of collective goods originally designed for the exclusive use of its members, such as the single market or security, to non-member actors even before final enlargement decisions are taken (Anghel and Jones, 2024). These developments reopen the scholarly debate on the interaction of EU 'widening' and 'deepening' (Anghel and Jones, 2021; Kelemen et al., 2014) and on differentiated integration (Schimmelfennig et al., 2015). Finally, we need to understand how the changed geopolitical context affects the EU’s accession conditionality and its effects on the transformation of candidate countries.

1: How does the changed context of EU enlargement affect policies towards, and their impact in, accession countries?
2: How can we theorize the access to the EU of non-member states and non-state actors, and its effects?
3: How does the EU balance multiple goods, such as the rule of law, security, and economic stability?
4: How does the EU change to organize collective action among heterogenous members with competing interests?
5: How does the accession process affect public opinion, party competition, and intergovernmental conflict?

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