The European Union should simultaneously declare that it considers Ukraine a European state eligible for membership and recommit to liberal democratic values as the foundation of European integration, writes Daniel C. Thomas.
Ukraine’s application for European Union membership will be on the agenda of this week’s summit of EU leaders at Versailles. As reflected in unprecedented expressions of support by prominent European cultural figures and the presidents of eight EU member states, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gives an undeniable sense of urgency and moral weight to Kyiv’s EU aspirations.
Although President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked the EU to grant his country ‘immediate’ European Union membership under some sort of fast-track procedure, the EU must first decide whether it considers Ukraine eligible in principle for membership. This is not just another measure that the EU might take to support Ukraine in its current emergency, nor a technical matter decided by lawyers and cartographers.
The Treaty on European Union is not entirely clear on which states are eligible for membership. According to Article 2, “The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” According to Article 49, “Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union.”
But Article 49 does not define what makes a state ‘European,’ nor does it obligate the EU to recognise the membership eligibility of a European state that respects the values listed in Article 2.
This ambiguity reflects the EU’s political dimension. Ever since the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community declared in 1957 that “any European state may apply to become a member,” the geographic limits of Europe have depended on the sense of purpose shared by the community’s heads of state and government. This sense of purpose has evolved, redefining which states are eligible for membership at each step.
In the late 1950s, the community’s leaders understood their experiment in regional integration to be part of the larger struggle against Communism, and thus offered a membership prospect to Greece and Turkey despite the weakness of their economies and democratic institutions. By the early 1960s, the community had redefined its collective purpose to promote parliamentary democracy, prompting a refusal to offer Spain’s dictatorial regime a path to membership in 1962 and a freezing of Greece’s ties to the community following the military takeover in 1967.
Over the following decades, the community’s leaders associated their growing community with liberal democracy, opening the door to Greece and Spain as they emerged from dictatorship and later welcoming post-Communist states from the Baltics to the Balkans. But agreement on these values broke down around 2005, leading to a stalemate on enlargement apart from Croatia in 2013.
Despite recent declarations of solidarity with the Ukrainian people, the EU has long been ambivalent about whether or not Ukraine would ever be eligible to join. At its December 1999 summit in Helsinki, the EU recognised that Ukraine is “in Europe” but failed to give it the same membership perspective that it was giving to other neighbouring states also in need of reform.
At a special EU-Ukraine summit in 2006, EU leaders praised political reforms adopted in Kyiv but refused to recognise a path to membership. In subsequent talks on an EU-Ukraine association agreement, the EU even refused to refer to Ukraine as a ‘European state’ because this sounded too much like the EU treaty’s Article 49.
The EU persisted in this position even after Ukraine’s ‘Maidan revolution’ in February 2014, when citizens braved sniper fire to demand a more democratic and EU-oriented future for their country. At a meeting of EU foreign ministers, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski argued for a clear commitment to Ukraine. Still, his French counterpart opposed any mention of Ukraine’s membership prospects in the communique and even attempted to insert language making clear that Ukraine would never become a member. In 2017, the Netherlands blocked wording in a final communique at another EU-Ukraine summit that the EU “acknowledges Ukraine’s European aspirations.”
So how will the EU respond now in Ukraine’s most dire hour? European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has stated that Ukraine is “one of us and we want them in the European Union”, and the European Parliament has adopted a resolution in the same spirit.
But only the 27 member states have the authority to decide on membership applications, and their responses so far have been mixed. Some EU governments have endorsed Zelenskyy’s application for a fast track to membership, while others argue that it doesn’t make sense to talk about Ukraine joining the EU now.
Both are missing the point. President Zelenskyy knows that EU accession takes years, and no declaration today will stop Russia’s assault on Ukraine’s outnumbered defenders.
But with Europe’s future once again being threatened by an authoritarian regime willing to use force and subversion to control its neighbours, the time has come for the European Union to recommit collectively to its earlier sense of purpose as the continent’s pre-eminent bastion of liberal democracy.
This means accepting no compromises in the liberal democratic credentials of its current member states, regardless of how much they are helping in the current crisis, and signalling unambiguously that other European states committed to the same values have a future within the European Union.
The most straightforward way for the EU to do this, and simultaneously to communicate to Ukraine’s defenders that they are not alone, is to recognise formally that a democratic Ukraine’s future lies within the European Union.
Daniel C. Thomas is a Professor of International Relations at Leiden University and author of The Limits of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2021).
This article was originally published on Euractiv.com.
