If enlargement is an inclined plane

Only those who actively contributed to the enlargement of the EU-27 can today lovingly examine the dossier of further enlargement to 36 or 37 countries. A process that one tends to forget and perhaps it is worth remembering that on 14 and 15 December 2023 the heads of state and government decided to open the EU's doors to Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia).

Sylvie Goulard, assistant to Romano Prodi when he was president of the European Commission that organised the first colossal enlargement of the borders of the united Europe, and MEP for eight years in the Democratic Movement, expresses with realism and passion the real stakes of the possible extension of the European institution as far as Ukraine or as far as Turkey in her Great to Die For. How to avoid the explosion of Europe. Needless to hide it: the great project of the 'Europe XXL' must be accompanied by a radical redesign of the governance rules of the European institutions. On pain of ungovernability, the structural weakening of the Union, its progressive irrelevance in the geopolitical chessboard at a time when it is conditioned by the neo-imperial and nationalist suggestions of Russia and China, but also of the United States and Turkey.

So far, Goulard warns us, the leaders of the founding states of the Union have acted as if the issue of reform was not within their actual grasp. This has given rise to a schizophrenia of history that sees the definition of rules of the game that overcome the absurdity of the unanimity requirement and the dualism of power between the Commission and the Council projected into an unreachable long term and also sees the states engaged in a continuous, anxious short-term chase after a present punctuated by the need for an undefined living space. An anxiety that induces a continuous shifting of boundaries. Worse: a neurotic bulimia of a Europe that wants to expand its sphere of influence to the point of swelling like the famous frog in Lafontaine's fable that explodes out of vanity towards the ox.

Europe has always mixed powerful idealistic impulses - at the limits of utopia, which can be naivety but also an extraordinary constructive force - with a patchwork of petty and contingent interests marked by a never-quenched nationalist egoism. In this ambivalence of values, the operation of further enlargement always relies on the rhetoric of belonging to the 'great European family', starting with the tragic affair of Ukraine, to which Europe owes an enormous moral and historical debt. But often the evocation of the 'great European family' veils the very history, the cultures of the different Europes, the tragedies, the wars, the different religious influences that are in any case part of the DNA of the Old Continent. Which has performed the miracle of having guaranteed peace for three generations and of having turned peoples that were previously enemies into brothers. A progress that is first and foremost human and political, but which is still searching for its definitive fulfilment, at times hindered by a mix of equivocal will and hypocrisy, entrusted to the extremely long timescales of the EU accession procedures.

For Goulard, 'a Europe made up of peoples who know each other badly and of incomplete cooperation will not give Europeans the slightest chance of playing an active role in a dangerous world'. A cultural dissociation that is well exemplified by the need to develop, given the times of warlike revanchism, a true common defence project. This point was also made by Romano Prodi in his introduction to the volume: 'On the one hand, our almost non-existence in the defence sector emerges while, on the other, we have to note that, while counting for nothing, the military expenditure of the 27 separate European armies is equivalent to the expenditure of the very powerful China'.