Events and Multimedia

As Montenegro’s accession negotiations near completion, attention shifts from reform adoption to reform durability. The question is whether undertaken commitments will remain credible once the incentives and constraints of the accession process fade. This challenge is neither new nor unique to Montenegro. Past enlargements show that institutional independence and rule-of-law safeguards can erode after EU entry. Developments in Hungary and Poland demonstrate how gradual institutional capture, changes to appointment systems and political pressure on oversight bodies can hollow out safeguards without formal treaty breaches, exposing the limits of ex-post enforcement tools. Recent efforts in Poland to restore judicial independence also illustrate that once institutional damage is entrenched, reversal is legally complex, politically contested and slow, even where democratic mandates for reform are clear.

According to recent reporting, EU leaders are considering ways to bring Ukraine into the European Union as early as 2027 – before all technical accession requirements are formally completed. The proposal, described in Brussels as “reverse enlargement”, reflects a growing conviction that Ukraine’s place in the EU can no longer be treated as a distant aspiration, but as a matter of geopolitical urgency. This conviction is justified. After four years of Russia’s full-scale war of aggression, Kyiv’s path into the EU is inseparable from Europe’s own security and credibility.

Europe is entering a new cycle of existential choices – on defence, competitiveness, enlargement and institutional reform. Yet the same question keeps returning: can the Union still act at the scale and speed its environment demands? The European Union was never meant to ‘finish’. It was built to endure. Unlike a nation-state, it does not move towards a final constitutional endpoint – despite recurring debates about the EU’s finalité. Unlike an alliance, it is not defined by a single threat. Unlike an international organisation, it cannot remain neutral about its members’ internal politics. The EU is, by design, a permanent experiment in shared sovereignty – a system that must constantly adjust its rules, bargains and legitimacy to remain functional in a changing world.

Europe’s instinct to reaffirm its democratic values, commitment to the UN Charter, and defence of the rules-based international order is understandable – and necessary. In an age of open aggression and transactional power politics, moral clarity still matters.  But clarity alone is not enough. The danger today is not that liberal democracy is naïve or obsolete. It is that Europe increasingly confuses the articulation of values with the exercise of power. Liberal democracy is defended as a creed, not enforced as a system –  at a moment when many actors, both inside and outside the European Union, are playing by entirely different rules.