Opinion | Proposed EU criteria for new members show wary Europe has China on its mind
- A new system aimed at facilitating the membership of Balkan states will now require candidates to be evaluated on their ability to ‘tackle malign third-country influence’
- This comes in the wake of EU warnings over the past year of China’s growing influence in Central and Eastern Europe
The gist of the proposal is to offer credible EU accession prospects to the Western Balkans. It also provides a glimpse of the EU’s new stress on geopolitics.
The immediate need for such a reassertion was created last October, when French President Emmanuel Macron vetoed the initiation of EU membership talks with North Macedonia and Albania. Macron insisted that the EU enlargement process needs a profound rethinking and reform, as the current format does not work. The new proposal aims to allay French concerns by setting more stringent membership criteria while keeping the appetite of the Western Balkan countries for EU membership.
The revised process maintains the carrot of membership by strengthening the credibility and predictability of the process, while adding sticks – sanctions on those who fail to meet the demands of Brussels.
In the history of the EU enlargement process, each new round led to new and more stringent conditions. When Britain, Denmark and Ireland joined the then European Communities in 1973, their accession was based on purely economic criteria. The subsequent Mediterranean round in the 1980s, which brought Greece, Portugal and Spain into the fold, for the first time specified democracy as a condition of membership. At the 1993 European Council in Copenhagen, the EU outlined free markets, democratic governance, and the adoption of the whole body of EU law as the stepping stones to membership.
