Jean Crombois, Georgetown University Visiting Researcher, Associate Professor of EU Politics at the American University in Bulgaria
The concept of resilience has been increasingly used in the EU foreign policy lexicon, especially in relation to those countries of Eastern Europe such as Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine that were not initially meant to join the European Union. The War in Ukraine changed this idea by unlocking paths to accession for these countries. That being said, it raises the question of whether resilience could be of any use to revive the EU enlargement process. This piece argues that resilience could provide an alternative path to foster reforms in the candidate countries for EU membership.
Resilience and EU Foreign Policy
With the EU Global Strategy (EUGS) adopted in 2016, resilience has become a key feature of EU foreign policy. The concept has been subjected to different interpretations and definitions, including within the EU discourse. As such, it has been considered as a major turn in EU foreign policy.
Resilience has been defined by Chandler as “the internal capacity of societies to cope with crises, with the emphasis on the development of self-organisation and internal capacities and capabilities rather than the external provision of aid, resources or policy solutions.” As such, the term had already been used by organizations other than the EU, as well in other EU policy documents with, though at times, different definitions. In the EUGS resilience is defined as follows: “the ability of states and societies to reform thus withstanding and recovering from internal and external crises.” According to Natalie Tocci, the main architect of the EUGS, resilience did not mean, however, that the EU was giving up on its normative and transformative ambitions. In other words, resilience was conceived as a means to achieve these ambitions.
There is, however, a vivid debate whether this turn marks, if not an abandon, a lowering of the EU’s transformative ambitions in its foreign policy, or whether it would still be aligned with its normative ambitions in terms of promoting democracy and the rule of law. For example, Bendiek argues that the use of resilience meant that, for the EU, “[t] the idea of democratic transformation of the European neighborhood and the goal of perpetual integration of all member states are gradually sidelined.” Others, such as Juncos, offers a more nuanced assessment by stating that “the rise of resilience can work to strengthen the idea of normative power by underscoring the non-coercive nature of his [the EU] power.” Finally, the question of resilience has also been approached by Bargues, Joseph and Juncos in the context of the EU’s response to the decline of the liberal international order.
For the EU, resilience is meant to reflect a new form of governance that marks a shift to a new form of complexity, where threats are becoming more difficult to predict. As a result, the EU aims at developing more adaptable and flexible approaches while emphasizing the need to acknowledge local practices and micromanagement.
More concretely, a resilience based foreign policy would rest upon two main priorities. The first is aimed at developing long term and sustained actions. In this way, resilience would provide for a policy framework that brings together all the stakeholders and institutions under the same umbrella. Key to this framework is the need to achieve cohesion between the different policies, so to be able to tackle all the aspects of crises or conflicts. The second consists of promoting bottom-up and local ownership of addressing crises instead of externally-imposed solutions or elite-driven ones.
EU Transformative Power
The concept of the EU as a ‘transformative power’ was introduced by Leonard, who defined it as follows: “Europe’s obsession with legal frameworks means that it transforms the countries it comes into contact with, instead of just skimming the surface. Europe doesn’t change countries by threatening to invade them: its biggest threat is to cut off contact with them.” This concept can also be related to the one of the EU as a ‘normative power,’ put forward by Manners. In this vein, EU foreign policy objectives steer towards the values of democracy, respect for human and fundamental rights, and the refusal of resorting to hard power instruments.
The EU’s transformative ambitions are deeply embedded in the experience of its enlargements to Central and Eastern Europe in 2004 and 2007. They are still considered as an essential feature of the EU enlargement policy as confirmed by the EU Commission in its 2023 Enlargement Communication, by stating: “A credible, merit-based prospect of EU membership is the key driver of transformation and thus enhances our collective security and socio-economic prosperity.”
EU Enlargement and Geopolitics
With the War in Ukraine, EU enlargement has become more geopolitical than ever. Such geopolitical shift, however, did not start with the outbreak of the hostilities in Ukraine and were already mentioned in 2018 EU Enlargement Communication. In February and March 2022, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine applied for EU membership. After a record speed process, the EU granted, in June 2022, candidate status to Moldova and Ukraine; later, in December 2023, it was Georgia. Meanwhile, in December 2022, Bosnia was included in the list of candidate countries. According Zweers and Rossokhaska, this decision was justified mostly by geopolitical reasons. Indeed, according the EU Commission, the reform process in the country, especially with respect to constitutional and electoral reforms had stalled.[i]
By granting EU candidate status to these three countries – Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine – the EU put an end to the fundamental difference between EU enlargement policy and the EU’s special policy addressed to the Eastern European countries, known as the Eastern Partnership. Indeed, if both policies shared much in common, the latter was not meant to lead to EU accession for the Eastern partner countries. In doing so, not only does the EU have to reconsider the future of its policy towards the rest of the Eastern partners not interested in EU membership[ii], but has also to include the new candidate countries in its enlargement policy aimed at transforming them for the purpose of joining as member states.
The net effect of EU enlargement on the candidate countries in the Western Balkans has been rather mixed. In terms of political reforms, all the countries in the region have had little if no improvements since 2014-2015. New concepts, such as the ones of “backsliding,” “de-democratization,” or even “competitive authoritarianism” – were introduced to describe the political systems in the Western Balkans as far as rule of law and fundamental freedoms were concerned. Concretely, such systems were defined by Bieber as having weak democratic institutions and experiencing the exploitation of that weakness by authoritarian political actors to gain and retain power.
The reasons for the lack of success for the transformative approach in the context of EU enlargement process can be summarized as follows. First, the EU approach was very much centered on the candidate countries’ leaders rather than on their institutions, not mentioning non-state actors. This has contributed not only to strengthening their legitimacy, but also to increasing state capture and generating further obstruction to the reform process itself. Second, the EU approach has been too much technical and not enough political. In other words, the EU paid much more attention to formal processes, such as the transposition of EU legislation, than to the political dynamics of clientelism and corruption.
The comparison, in terms of reforms, between the Western Balkan candidate countries and some of the Eastern European countries, with the exceptions of Belarus, Turkey and Azerbaijan, shows very similar results with few major differences. In terms of the liberal democracy index[iii] designed by the V-Dem Institute, the Western Balkans show only slightly better scores than Eastern European countries, with the exception of Serbia. In terms of economic reforms, the Eastern European countries have even performed better than some of their Western Balkan counterparts. This does not discount the fact that performances between these countries may show some large degrees of differences.
Conclusion
To some extent, the resilience challenges are similar between all the candidate countries, save from the security and military aspects for the new candidate countries such as Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. These challenges concern low levels of social trust, as well as the low legitimacy of governance actors and of government institutions. By offering a new governance approach, resilience could provide a new path for guiding the reform process by addressing some of the shortcomings of the present EU enlargement policy towards the Western Balkans.
[i] In March 2024, the EU member states decided to open accession negotiations with Bosnia.
[ii] To date, these are Azerbaijan and Belarus while Armenia has showed some interest in applying for EU membership.
[iii] In this ranking the lower the ranking, the better the situation in terms of liberal democracy.
Democracy & Society 