Admitting mistakes won’t harm the EU

The EU is not renowned for admitting its mistakes. To be fair, no one - individuals, organisations or states - is particularly prone to doing the mea culpa, but then again, not everyone is the largest and richest trading bloc in the world, with border states pounding on the door demanding entry. Nor has everyone committed two grave errors in recent enlargements, thereby weakening its bargaining position on every count.

Conventional wisdom has it that the EU is probably done with enlargement in the near future and possibly in the far future too if public opinion in most of its member states has anything to do with it. In the politest of terms, while nobody objects to another enlargement per se - barring the French with regard to Turkey - then nobody is actually in favour of it either.

But such polite sentiment carries little water with aspirant states, from the tumultuous Ukraine, through the complex Moldova, to the massive and strategically crucial Turkey. To all of these and a long list of others located more distantly, the EU is everything from the profound symbol of Western advancement to the literal pot of gold at the end of a rainbow - and they are determined to get in.

Such sentiments were clearly on display last week at the 17th Economic Forum in Krynica, Poland - an important annual fest for all states from Germany eastwards. Two issues dominated all debates: relations with Russia and EU enlargement. To an extent the two are linked, simply by dint of Russia being ever more omnipresent the further east one goes. But it would be wrong to dismiss aspirations for EU membership as simply a safety bolt from Russia.

Having watched the EU successively open its doors to a large number of states over the past decade, aspirants see no reason to cease persevering in this matter. To such partial observers persistence seems the key to attaining membership, even if it is done in the crudest of ways. Worse still, other than bluntly telling them to go away - which is strategically unsound in every way, not to mention impolite and thus un-European - the EU has lost any sanction over such aspiring states, because of its aforementioned grave errors.

The first of these was admitting states that had not met EU standards, the so-called Copenhagen criteria. This most clearly applies to Romania and Bulgaria, which were more or less openly defined as not ready upon admission; but there are mutterings in the corridors of EU institutions that a number of those who gained entry in the 2004 ‘Big Bang’ enlargement were not exactly up to the mark.

Apart from obviously seeming to lower the level of competence necessary, the lesson most aspirants have taken from this precedent is that the EU is extremely pliable: a standard is not an absolute value so much as a starting point for negotiation.

Such a lesson is bad enough, but it is compounded by the second error: admitting Cyprus, a divided state with an unresolved political dispute. This being the case, a state such as Moldova now sees its ‘frozen conflict’ with Transdniestria as far from being the barrier to membership it once was - a frame of mind that applies also to a number of states in the Caucuses and other areas.

Taken together, these errors are grave not just because they reflect bad political judgement, but above all because they have caused the EU to lose one of its greatest assets: the power of deterrence. If membership is possible despite the rule book, why should aspirants bother rectifying any of their ills? As against this the EU has no sanction: if it denies any possibility of membership it is sending politically fraught states into the arms of potential enemies to the union, and if it demands these same states fundamentally reform they can simply bring up - and apparently do - the errors of the past.

There is an old adage in spokesmanship - another of the weaknesses of the EU - that once admitted, it is difficult to beat up anyone for a mistake. It is only when denied that it gets compounded. However politically painful now, admitting mistakes made in previous enlargements is the only way out of this situation. It will be a small price to pay for restoring the political power of the Union.

• Ilana Bet-El is an academic, author and policy adviser based in Brussels.

The EU is not renowned for admitting its mistakes. To be fair, no one - individuals, organisations or states - is particularly prone to doing the mea culpa, but then again, not everyone is the largest and richest trading bloc in the world, with border states pounding on the door demanding entry. Nor has everyone committed two grave errors in recent enlargements, thereby weakening its bargaining position on every count.