Enlargement is no longer the technical process or the secondary policy area it was for over a decade: it is now a test of the EU’s ability to project stability, consolidate its continent, and act strategically. And yet the Union’s decision-making architecture has not kept pace with this renewed mission. Over time, unanimity has come to pervade virtually every procedural step of the accession process, far exceeding what the negotiating frameworks themselves originally envisaged. The result has been a proliferation of veto points at even the most technical and incremental stages, making accession slow, unpredictable, and increasingly disconnected from the reform performance of candidate countries on the ground. The risk is clear: unless reforms are introduced, the Union will remain unable to act decisively on what once was its most powerful foreign policy tool.
To address this, Think Europe, Balkan Center for Constructive Policies – Solution, Institut für Europäische Politik, supported by the ERSTE Foundation jointly publish A Europe that Acts: Effective Decision-making on Enlargement in a New Geopolitical Era. The paper argues that the Treaties explicitly require unanimity only on the membership application and for agreeing the terms of accession — meaning that changing the current practice requires political will rather than lengthy treaty-changing procedures. The paper maps four concrete models for introducing QMV at intermediary stages — Full QMV, Consensus Like QMV, Dutch QMV, and QMV Lite — showing that there are, so to speak, fifty shades of grey between full unanimity and full QMV. Crucially, moving to QMV does not relinquish control over the two most important political decisions in the process: no country can become a candidate, and no country will ever become a member state, without all EU member states agreeing. The Union has the tools. The frameworks exist. The legal path is open. What remains is the political choice.
