On Wednesday, ten countries celebrated their 20th anniversary in the European Union.
Poland has found its place “among friends, among allies, in Europe, at home: generations of Poles have fought for this,” said Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski at a ceremony on the Polish-German border, on the bridge over the Polish Oder border , which connects the cities of Słubice and Frankfurt on the Oder.
May 1, 2004 was the largest single enlargement in the history of the EU. Of the ten countries that joined that day, eight had emerged from behind the Iron Curtain in the wake of the upheavals of 1989: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
The Mediterranean island states of Malta and Cyprus also joined on the same day. Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2007. Croatia followed in 2013. Great Britain – the only country to have left the EU so far – left in 2020.
Sikorski was accompanied at the ceremony on the Oder by his German counterpart Annalena Baerbock. She said the entire EU benefited from the 2004 enlargement, not just the new members.
But European integration “doesn’t fall out of the sky,” she said. With the war raging in Ukraine, “the EU must be reformed to become stronger in security policy, to speak with one voice and at the same time to include those countries that also want to become part of this union of freedom and security.”
A joint statement from the presidents of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia said on Wednesday: “We have experienced tremendous economic growth, stability and security, while representing a remarkable success story of European integration and transformation.”
The day before, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Czech President Petr Pavel celebrated the anniversary at a meeting in Prague. Both spoke out in favor of further enlargement of the EU.
“If we leave the Western Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia at the door for too long, we will leave them to players like Russia, who do not mean well towards the Europeans and Europe at all,” warned Pavel. Steinmeier said: “The states of the Western Balkans, Ukraine and Moldova belong to a free Europe and to our Union.”
“A DATE WITH HISTORY”
European Council President Charles Michel said on Monday that the EU and candidate countries must be ready for enlargement by 2030, calling it “a date with history.”
But the prospect of enlargement has long sparked debates among current EU members about how the bloc should function. A particularly heated question is whether the EU should continue to give each country veto power over certain decisions such as defense and budget.
Another question is whether countries that break EU rules should still be able to receive payments from the common budget.
“The EU is above all a union of values, not an ATM,” said Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib, who wants to “solve the problem of sometimes abusive vetoes.”
Baerbock said: “Our generation now faces the task of defending and strengthening the European project of peace and freedom, even if it costs an incredible amount of energy.” She added that reforms are needed for this to succeed, including fewer veto options.
The Western Balkans are still waiting
At a meeting of European ministers on Tuesday in Brussels, representatives of the ten current EU accession candidates were present for the first time: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Turkey and Ukraine.
European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová said it was “a good rehearsal” of what a 37-member debate would look like.
Turkey became an EU candidate in 1999, but has probably never been further away from membership than it is today, thanks to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s strong regime.
The Western Balkans are a different story. Brussels sees Montenegro as the country closest to accession. However, an expansion is not expected until the end of this decade at the earliest.
For Slovenia, joining the EU fulfilled one of the most important foreign policy goals that it had set itself after independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.
Polls suggest that popular support for the EU in Slovenia remains above the EU average and that there are no Eurosceptic parties in the country’s parliament.
The EU has learned “a lot” about Russia from its eastern members
In an interview with several news agencies at the end of April, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: “Thanks to the bitter experience that countries in Central and Eastern Europe had with the Soviet Union, the EU has learned a lot about the patterns of behavior of the Kremlin and [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and has become more vigilant.”
The EU is not perfect, “but the benefits of EU membership are enormous,” she said. “Of course we are much stronger [at] 27 when we were 15,” said von der Leyen.
The content of this article is based on reporting by BTA, CTK, dpa, EFE, FENA, Lusa, MIA, PAP, Ritzau, STA, Tanjug, TASR as part of the European Newsroom (enr) project.
