After a boom period that saw a series of candidacies for joining the European Union and, subsequently, a string of actual accessions, European territory has not expanded since 2013 and the effective entry of Croatia into the Union. It even diminished with the UK’s ‘Brexit’ in 2020. However, the return of war to the Old Continent has revived the desire for EU membership in a number of countries directly or indirectly threatened by Russia. We have seen this with Ukraine, which has been able to present its candidacy more rapidly than expected and whose accession negotiations began officially in June 2024, alongside those of Moldavia. And it should not be long before Georgia joins them. Admittedly, as Jean-François Drevet reminds us here, the EU has over time demonstrated its capacity to keep the peace on a continent battered by centuries of conflict, and also to stimulate the socio-economic development of its member states. However, when it comes to new candidacies, two difficulties arise: the imperative need to respect the accession criteria regarding democratic values and the question of the Union’s continuing capacity to maintain peace and security in the context of the return of war and a relatively disengaged Atlantic Alliance. On this last point — the security strand — it is not easy to see how the EU could reverse the dynamic in the short or medium term.
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