Why EU should not delay Ukraine's membership and how to accelerate the process

For years, the European Union treated enlargement as a slow, technocratic and largely predictable process. Candidate countries adapted to EU rules step by step, while the Union itself remained geopolitically stable.

Ukraine has changed that reality.

Today, enlargement is unfolding under conditions of war, reconstruction, geopolitical rivalry and economic realignment. And the EU still lacks the institutional tools to manage these processes together.

A kind of conflict has emerged between tradition and reality.

Read more about why uncertainty in Ukraine's European integration process could create problems for the EU and what Brussels should do about it in the article by Laszlo Bruszt of the Central European University Democracy Institute: Neither fast nor endless: how EU should rethink Ukraine's accession process.

The EU often behaves as if delay were neutral. But in Ukraine’s case, delay carries major costs. 

Prolonged uncertainty also creates political risks inside Ukraine itself. Earlier enlargement rounds in the Western Balkans demonstrated that when accession remains permanently open-ended, geopolitical orientation can again become politically contested.

At the same time, Brussels is not wrong to worry about internal political backlash.

Ukraine’s future accession will affect agricultural markets, cohesion funding, industrial competition and budget politics inside the EU. In several member states, governments fear that rapid integration could generate domestic disruption and strengthen anti-EU forces.

This is the core deadlock.

Delay weakens the strategic value of enlargement. But rapid integration without safeguards risks undermining political support for enlargement inside the Union.

The issue, therefore, is not whether enlargement should move faster or slower. It is whether Europe can build institutions capable of managing integration under conditions of uncertainty.

Right now, the EU’s policy architecture remains fragmented. Accession negotiations, reconstruction financing, industrial policy and sectoral integration largely operate separately despite overlapping in practice.

The EU should therefore create a coordinated framework linking enlargement policy, reconstruction instruments, sectoral integration and EU-level industrial policy into a single strategic process.

That is the missing tool.

Importantly, ideas in this direction are already emerging from Ukrainian policy debates themselves.

Economists Tymofiy Mylovanov and Gérard Roland have proposed establishing a Ukraine Reconstruction and European Integration Agency (UREIA) – inspired partly by the Marshall Plan’s Economic Cooperation Administration – that would coordinate reconstruction with preparation for EU accession.

The broader point is not institutional design for its own sake. It is that reconstruction, enlargement and economic integration can no longer be treated as separate processes.

If Europe cannot create a credible pathway for gradual integration, uncertainty will continue to grow – economically, politically and geopolitically.

The stakes therefore extend well beyond Ukraine alone.

The question is whether the EU can adapt its own institutions to a world in which enlargement has once again become a strategic instrument rather than simply a technocratic process.

Ukraine is not misunderstanding enlargement. 

It is revealing why Europe now needs a different kind of enlargement policy.