Accelerating EU Enlargement

Milana Bagdasarian, Luna Dupalo, Nia Ivanidze, Greta Vaino

Accelerated EU enlargement has become a strategic priority for EU institutions and Member States, in response to geopolitical pressures. Yet a critical question remains: are candidate countries ready to integrate into EU Council structures? Current benchmarks fail to assess political and security readiness, while existing legal pathways remain underutilised. This brief proposes a new assessment framework for EU decision‑makers, Member States and candidate countries to ensure that accelerated integration is both feasible and secure.

Recommendations

1. The EU should move beyond acquis-transposition benchmarks towards a Participation Readiness Framework assessing whether candidate states can effectively and safely integrate into EU Council structures. This framework is based on the principle of operationalised conditionality: access is earned through verifiable performance rather than political discretion.
2. Participation should be structured in tiers, from informal dialogue to systematic engagement in non-Council fora, with each tier linked to measurable performance and subject to reversibility.
3. A Participation Readiness Scorecard should be jointly maintained by the Commission (DG NEAR), European External Action Service and the Council Secretariat, covering three dimensions:
   • Information and cyber security capacity.
   • Institutional integrity, including vetting
     systems and coordination capacity.
   • Geopolitical alignment, including consistency with the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, and resilience to foreign influence.
4. Assessments should draw on existing instruments, combining candidate-provided reporting with EU-level verification, including EU-verified audits and independent monitoring mechanisms. The scorecard should function as a direct decision making tool determining access to participation formats.
5. Preconditions should evolve from baseline requirements (basic information security framework, formal policy alignment) to demonstrated operational reliability (secure handling capacity, functioning computer security incident response teams (CSIRT), sustained enforcement record).
6. Participation should remain conditional and reversible through continuous monitoring and incident-triggered reviews in cases of security breaches, sanctions for non–compliance or deterioration in policy alignment. Where thresholds are no longer met, participation is downgraded or suspended.