Two Balkan strongmen co-author an article proposing EU membership without veto rights. This is not the beginning of a joke, but a depiction of reality and an attempt to breathe new life into the bloc’s flagging enlargement program.
The message? We know EU expansion has ground to a halt partly because Hungary and Slovakia are proving such bad team players. So, forget membership with a veto for the six Balkan candidates; we’ll accept membership-lite instead.
The long-standing leaders of Albania and Serbia, Edi Rama and Aleksandar Vučić, jointly presented the idea in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Their proposal would mean the candidate members would win access to the EU’s single market and travel-free area, with institutional representation and veto rights postponed to a later date.
The two men’s appeal may have landed on fertile ground. Two weeks earlier, Marta Kos, commissioner responsible for enlargement policy, had acknowledged that the EU would block the path of “Trojan horses”.
It didn’t take a cryptographer to understand who she was talking about, and indeed Viktor Orbán soon afterwards underlined the point by blocking the €90bn ($104bn) EU loan to Ukraine. On March 8, the Slovak prime minister said that if Orbán lost the April 12 Hungarian election, he would ensure the veto on Ukraine aid continued.
Understandably, perhaps, the idea of handing veto power to another six countries in Southeastern Europe — Serbia and Albania, plus North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo — does not generate enthusiasm.
And if fairness to the Western Balkan states, such political powers are not why they seek to join. EU membership offers the prospect of extensive economic benefits, including access to the single market, one of the world’s most prosperous economic zones.
The catch is that they have to meet EU standards, and these have proved hard to swallow for many political elites in the continent’s eastern half.
The most persistent issues concern the rule-of-law, including state capture, corruption, the lack of an independent judiciary, and media freedom.
And here’s the problem — Rama and Vučić want to have their cake and eat it. They want access to the single market without curbing their authoritarian tendencies. With a potential “membership lite”, they believe they can avoid rule-of-law reforms that could challenge their grip on power. In Serbia’s case, that would also mean maintaining good relations with Moscow and Beijing, along with continued non-alignment with the EU’s foreign-policy directives and positions.
Even so, their idea may not be dismissed out of hand. Most members of the 27-member club are heartily sick of the grandstanding and blocking tactics of Orbán and like-minded leaders in Slovakia. Enlargement commissioner Kos laid out the current thinking on this in her February speech:
“We need to have safeguards that ensure new members stick to the rules and the integrity of our Union is assured, even five, 10, or 20 years down the line,” she said. The bloc would not institute a two-tier membership, but if new members backtracked on key commitments, “safeguards must bite,” she said. New rules were being drawn up, Kos added.
The right of veto is one of the most precious political tools at the member states’ disposal. Key decisions, including enlargement and foreign policy, require unanimity; if one member state vetoes, the entire process halts. Orbán has proved how the abuse of veto rights can leave the EU divided, enfeebled, and ineffective on a global stage.
Deferred veto powers might reassure them that they would not be exposed to Orbán-style blockages, blackmail, and overtime bargaining.
Yet an Orbán opt-out would not solve the EU’s core problem with enlargement. The bloc is divided on how to welcome new member states (if any). At the same time, the EU also wants to move forward with enlargement, particularly under the current European Commission.
The accession of at least one country — with Montenegro as the frontrunner — would send a strong message to Ukraine that the promise of membership remains achievable, but no one can reasonably expect new countries to join under the same conditions as Croatia did back in 2013.
There have been attempts to breathe new life into the enlargement policy. The 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a wake-up call that it is a geopolitical imperative, yet little progress has been achieved so far. Gradual integration, accession in phases, has emerged as the preferred path forward, allowing access to candidate countries to certain policy areas once the rule-of-law criteria are met.
At the end of the day, however, enlargement policy remains a political decision that requires the approval of all current member states.
Montenegro, the coastal Adriatic state, will be the litmus test. It will prove if EU member states are genuinely committed to enlargement, and what new conditions will be included in its accession document. The country pledged to conclude its accession talks by the end of this year. While being supportive, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, noted that this is an “ambitious objective”.
Creativity in enlargement policy — even the self-interested version proposed by Rama and Vučić — is welcome if the idea can speed up enlargement, while ensuring strong adherence to the rule of law before and after accession. But if leaders only seek economic benefits from the EU, the EU’s project of transformation and democratization crumbles.
Ferenc Németh is a Ph.D. candidate at Corvinus University of Budapest and a Fulbright visiting researcher at Georgetown University. He has previously conducted research in Toronto and Skopje, worked as a research fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, and interned at EULEX Kosovo. His areas of expertise include Central and Southeast Europe, EU enlargement, and regional security. Ferenc was a Denton Fellow at CEPA in 2024.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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