If the leaders of the European Union listened only to their hearts, they’d fully embrace Ukraine into the bloc at their summit in Brussels this month,
Bloomberg reports.
As French President Emmanuel Macron put it, “We feel in our heart that Ukraine, through its fight and its courage, is already today a member of our Europe, of our family and of our union.” In that spirit, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, went to Kyiv in April and personally handed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy the application questionnaire.
Europeans have not only hearts but also heads. And the heads of many leaders and Eurocrats — including Macron’s — are shaking rather than nodding.
Giving full membership to Ukraine now would create so many new problems for the EU that the bloc — never a paragon of effective governance to begin with — might break down, or even apart. The same warning applies to accepting Moldova or Georgia, and even Albania, North Macedonia and the other Balkan nations already in the queue.
Rushing their memberships would be a bad idea not only because these countries — their economies, judiciaries and other institutions — aren’t ready. It would also be reckless because the EU has never resolved an intrinsic tension between what Eurocrats call “widening” and “deepening” — that is, admitting new members vs. integrating the existing ones.
With each of the seven rounds of enlargement — from the original six countries to the 27 today — running the show has become messier and more unwieldy. The growing number of institutions and Commissioners — each country appoints one — is the least of it, as is the Babel-like chaos of languages, traditions and national interests. The real problem is that the EU, as it grew, didn’t rewrite its treaties thoroughly enough to allow the bloc to stay coherent and deal with real-world problems.