Science
The Uneven Geography of Compassion in Disaster Reporting
18 August 2026
Many candidates, no guarantees
Ten countries are currently waiting in line to join the European Union. Nine of them — Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Georgia, North Macedonia, Moldova, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine — hold official candidate status, while Kosovo counts as a “potential candidate.” Since five member states — Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Romania, and Slovakia — do not recognize Kosovo’s independence, and will not do so in any imaginable future, and since all members must agree before the EU can admit a new state, the accession of this former Serbian province can be considered unlikely.
Who can become a member of the European Union? Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union states that “any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2” may apply. Before we turn to those values, it is worth noting that the phrase “European State” itself remains unclear.
Turkey holds candidate status, the highest possible status for a state aspiring to join the Union, even though only 3 percent of its territory lies on the European continent. That is less than in the case of Kazakhstan, where the figure ranges from 4–5 percent to 10 percent, depending on how one draws the partly conventional border between Europe and Asia. As a curiosity, one may add that in 1987 Morocco applied for membership of the EEC, the EU’s predecessor.
EU values are not binary
The values themselves are similarly ambiguous. Article 2 TEU lists them as “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” Some of these concepts remain imprecise.
For example, what exactly is “the rule of law” if neither the treaties nor other EU documents define it, while specialists distinguish at least three — and in reality more — major European traditions of the concept? The situation becomes even more complicated with human rights. One only has to notice how differently various countries understand the first and most important of them: the right to life. From an axiological point of view, then, the matter is not obvious either. There is enormous room for the politicization of values and for treaty abuses, which, in fact, we have already encountered.
In 1993, the EU defined the so-called Copenhagen criteria: the conditions that a state applying for membership must meet. These include democracy, the rule of law, a functioning market economy, and the ability to incorporate EU law into domestic law. The European Commission carries out ongoing monitoring and technical assessment. Yet here, too, we deal with ambiguous concepts and with the inevitable evaluative nature of the Commission’s opinions, so it is hard to describe the situation as binary.
One veto stops the entire accession
By contrast, one criterion is binary — either fulfilled or not: the requirement that all EU states unanimously agree to admit a new country. Vetoes and threats of vetoes have accompanied the admission of new members many times. Sometimes they concerned issues of the highest strategic importance, as during the first enlargement, then still of the Communities rather than the Union, to include the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark. President de Gaulle’s France blocked that enlargement twice. A similar dynamic appeared during the so-called 10+2 enlargement in 2004 and 2007, which included Poland and at one point faced the threat of a Greek veto.
At other times, vetoes concerned matters that seemed marginal to most states but mattered deeply to the two directly involved: the existing member and the would-be candidate. One example was the Slovenian-Croatian dispute over 19 square kilometers in the Bay of Piran. It also happened that neither the Union itself nor any of its member states had to block a candidate’s accession, because the candidate understood the need to change its policy, including its historical policy, and did so. Croatia’s turn away from its Ustaše past offers such a case.
EU member states: France closed the door twice
The three attempts by the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark to join what were then the European Communities belong to EU prehistory, but they remain instructive. After losing its global-power status and in the face of the successes of the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community, Britain revised its earlier skeptical attitude toward European integration. In 1961, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan submitted an application to join the EEC. Ireland and Denmark, both economically tied to the United Kingdom, did the same. France vetoed the application in 1963.
The same thing happened again in 1967, this time essentially without justification. President de Gaulle merely stated that “Great Britain is still not ready economically and politically.” In other words, one might say, he said no because he said no. Only in 1972 did his successor, Georges Pompidou, “let” the United Kingdom into the EEC, effective from 1 January 1973, together with the two other states and Norway. Norway, however, ultimately did not become a member of the Communities after a negative referendum result.
Greece forced Cyprus’s entry
In more recent times, Greece twice exerted major influence over the shape of EU enlargements. First, it forced the accession of Cyprus in 2004. The Union treated this candidacy with reserve because the island had been divided since 1974 into a southern, Greek part and a northern, Turkish part over which the Republic of Cyprus has no control. Cyprus’s accession in a bizarre formula — under which the entire island became a member of the Union, but EU law was “suspended” in the northern part — contradicted the official doctrine contained in the “Agenda 2000” document, which aimed to protect the Union from importing geopolitical instability.
When Greece threatened to veto the accession of the other 11 states in 2004/2007, including Poland, Brussels gave way. As a result, an area emerged inside the European Union, at least theoretically, where the basic currency is the Turkish lira.
The power of the veto threat is so great that Greece even managed to force another state to change its name. For many years, it blocked Macedonia’s aspirations to join the European Union and NATO, arguing that the country’s name belonged exclusively to Greek historical and cultural heritage and fearing territorial claims against its own northern province of the same name. The vetoes proved effective. Under the Prespa Agreement of June 2018, Macedonia changed its name to the Republic of North Macedonia, and Greece withdrew its vetoes.
On 26 March 2020, the European Council approved the opening of negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania, and one day later North Macedonia became a member of NATO. This, however, did not end North Macedonia’s accession problems, because Bulgaria may still block it for historical, linguistic, and identity-related reasons.
EU membership: Croatia changed its politics of memory
It is difficult to discuss all vetoes and threats of vetoes, because they do not always become official, and some blockades remain temporary or concern specific negotiating chapters rather than accession as a whole. It is worth recalling, however, a story in which neither a member state’s veto threat nor any action by the European Union was needed, at least officially, to influence the policy of a candidate country.
This concerns the deep change in historical narrative that took place in Croatia. After the country declared independence in 1991 and during the war of 1991–1995, Croatia saw a clear return to the traditions of the fascist Independent State of Croatia, or NDH, which existed from 1941 to 1945 and was treated as the “first independent Croatian state” in centuries. The revival also involved the symbolism of the fascist Ustaše movement, responsible for the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma, including at the Jasenovac camp.
Croatia’s first president, Franjo Tuđman, encouraged this return through a policy of reconciliation and unification between the descendants of communist partisans and the descendants of Ustaše members for the purpose of a common struggle against the Serbs. At the same time, the first constitution of 1990 already referred to antifascist traditions and distanced itself from the Ustaše legacy.
The requirements of integration with the European Union and the need to build credibility on the international stage led to the country’s gradual “de-Ustašization.” Yet it seems that no one had to remind the Croats of this or force them to do it. The situation differs completely from Ukraine, which invokes Bandera traditions.
EU enlargement: three years or almost 40
There is no regular pattern when it comes to the waiting time for membership. Finland took less than three years from application to full membership. Turkey submitted its application 39 years ago, on 14 April 1987, and has been an associate state of the EEC, the Union’s predecessor, for — wait for it — 63 years. Even if Turkey still cared about integration, it would have to reckon with very tough, perhaps prohibitive, conditions imposed especially by Greece and Cyprus.
But Turkey no longer cares. Around 2010, Egemen Bağış, then minister of state and chief negotiator for Turkey’s EU membership, told the author of these words that his country’s tolerance for being led by the nose by the Union’s biggest players — especially France and Germany — was just coming to an end. And it did end. Some 10 years ago, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stopped looking toward “European values” and moved toward autocracy, which froze the accession process.
The conclusion from all of this is that EU enlargement is almost never settled until the very last day, before a state actually becomes a full member. But once it does become one, it gains a powerful instrument for influencing the policies of other states — provided it wants to use that instrument and knows how to do so.
Read this article in Polish: Dziesięć państw czeka na Unię. Co może zamknąć im drzwi?
