Soft law for the Union, hard law for the candidates
The Commission’s pre-enlargement policy reviews are expected this autumn, three years after the Granada Declaration and several missed dates later. Their content is unknown but their form is not – and that is already telling.
The reviews will arrive as a communication: non-binding, confined to what is possible under the current Treaties and likely to focus where consensus already exists. Meanwhile, the debate over Montenegro’s eventual accession treaty is already turning to post-accession safeguards, triggers and enforcement.
Some of that asymmetry is structural. A communication cannot commit member states on budget, cohesion or agriculture; only they can. But safeguards are advancing faster than reviews, and the risk is that they come to stand in for the Union’s own preparedness.
They cannot. Safeguards manage the risks enlargement creates. They do not make the EU enlargement-ready. Both problems are being addressed – but not with equivalent specificity, commitment or consequence.
The reviews can still matter, not because they bind any party, but because they name trade-offs, sequence choices and set delivery dates. Enlargement’s credibility now rests on what the Union is willing to change itself – from its budget to its decision-making – and by when.
Corina Stratulat is Associate Director and Head of the European Politics and Institutions Programme
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