Analyst: EC Reports on Enlargement out of Step with Times

European Commission building (BETAPHOTO/EK/Lukasz Kobus)

The European Commission's latest enlargement reports again show that "Brussels never met a crisis it could not manage through footnotes," Corina Stratular of the Brussels-based European Policy Centre said in a piece published on Nov. 4, adding that the reports' tone was procedural and "the ambition safely contained within the margins of technocratic vocabulary."

"Benchmarks, clusters and screening reports pile up as if Europe could spreadsheet its way into strategic relevance," writes Stratulat, head of the European Policy Centre's European politics and institutions program. According to her, despite "tougher wording on laggards" and praise for reformers, the pace of reports on candidates and potential candidates' progress on the path to the EU remains out of step with the times.

"Enlargement moves at an administrative pace while history accelerates," Stratulat writes, adding that while "wars, populism, migration, technological revolutions and climate shocks are redrawing Europe's map," the EU and is member states "still narrate them through templates better suited for regulatory audits than geopolitical transformation."

"The loudest signal that European decision-making no longer matches the speed of events lies in what is missing," the piece noted. Namely, the long-promised pre-enlargement politicy reviews, aimed at examining the reforms required for enlargement, have again been put off. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, "ever cautious not to irritate member states, seems reluctant to confront the hard questions," like who will underwrite enlargement, who will call the shots and how the EU will function with more than 30 members, Stratulat wrote.