Tinatin Tsertsvadze / Apr 2026
Piotr Serafin, the European Commissioner for Budget, Anti-Fraud and Public Administration. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The European Union's enlargement has become a top geopolitical priority, and a response to mounting instability and global uncertainty.
But to live up to that declared ambition, and turn it into a tangible outcome, sustainable and predictable financial and political backing must follow. The European Commission's current proposal for the next Multiannual Financial Framework does not yet meet that test. The European Parliament made clear its position, this week, with an explicit call on the Commission to add a separate budget line for pre-enlargement allocations in the next Multiannual Financial Framework. This needs to be reiterated in the final and legally binding position of the EP after relevant Committees adopt their positions later this year. It is now up to the European Council to match that ambition. While the fundamentals of EU enlargement remain a merit-based process, anchored in reforms and convergence with EU law, the new geopolitical environment demands substantive and predictable financial support for candidate countries. These countries face new and emerging challenges: from energy and economic dependencies, to building resilience against hybrid and security threats.
EU integration has traditionally been accompanied by financial instruments. Yet, in July 2025, the Commission proposed integrating those instruments under a broad new Global Europe Instrument. It earmarks €43.2 billion in the next financial cycle for the entire Europe pillar of this instrument, without clear commitments to enlargement, leaving candidate countries wondering how seriously to take Brussels' political declarations.
It is crucial that EU institutions arrive with a clear vision and a delivery strategy for enlargement in the next EU budget.
The current toolkit offers useful lessons in this regard. The Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) has delivered predictability, yet socioeconomic convergence in the Western Balkans remains a long-standing failure that successive IPA generations have not addressed. The newer Reform and Growth Facilities for the Western Balkans and Moldova, and the Ukraine Facility, tell a different story: by tying disbursements to specific reforms and applying clearer conditionality, they have given recipient governments renewed ownership of the process.
Evidence from two decades of pre-accession financing points to five components that will be critical to turn political declarations on accession into reality.
First, the EU must ensure that funding allocated to enlargement is predictable and clearly programmed in the regulation.
Creating a dedicated European Integration Facility under the Global Europe pillar for 2028–2034 would set the right tone. Such a facility would signal that political prioritization is a genuine objective, not a slogan, and that the EU is putting money where it most matters. Any future funding for accession countries must be ring-fenced for enlargement.
At current IPA levels (€14.2 billion for 2021–2027), economic modeling suggests it would take between 11 and 100 years for Western Balkans countries to reach EU living standards. Our research, meanwhile, estimates that €35 billion would be required for the Western Balkans and Moldova combined — roughly €5 billion per country, subject to size and final negotiation — alongside €8 billion for Ukraine, outside the Ukraine Reserve, to provide the basis for genuine transformation and prepare these countries and their societies for EU membership.
Second, lessons from the three Facilities on Western Balkans, Moldova and Ukraine provide a sound basis for designing the next financial instrument.
The Commission's proposal remains vague about programmable funding, sending yet another signal of uncertainty. Earmarking at least 65 percent of the European Integration Facility as programmable, with individual country programs on an annual basis, would provide much-needed stability to accession countries. To weather any upcoming crisis or new priority, the Facility should also include a flexible funding envelope to meet unforeseen contingencies.
Third, any future instrument must be conceived on a fundamentals-first basis.
The European Integration Facility should embed clear rule-of-law conditionality in its programming, with the ability to suspend funds quickly in the event of democratic backsliding or geopolitical drift, and to redirect funding to civil society organizations (CSOs) and other democratic actors.
A dedicated civil society facility will be key to ensuring that CSOs continue their vital role in accession countries, where they often bring significant expertise on environment, climate, energy, rule of law and justice reform, and where they sit on government working groups. Independent media organizations are equally critical, especially against a backdrop of disinformation and foreign interference campaigns aimed at discrediting EU integration and stoking euroscepticism, as we have seen in Serbia, Georgia, and Moldova, where coordinated disinformation campaigns have actively worked to undermine public support for EU integration.
Fourth, countries that conclude accession negotiations during the next financial period should benefit from a dedicated commitment for transitional mechanisms within EU instruments, ensuring a smooth handover from external funding to internal financing in the final stages of convergence.
Finally, a European Integration Investment Platform should be established to coordinate and attract investments for candidate countries, complementing the financial assistance. Similar models already exist in the Western Balkans Investment Framework and the Ukraine Investment Framework.
The Commission's proposal stops short of fully translating the political momentum behind enlargement into financial envelopes.
The European Parliament has spoken in favour of this view, and the Council now has a chance to meet the moment — to match the geopolitical challenge of our time and anchor the EU's aspiring members into the Union, better prepared, with the socioeconomic stability and institutional reforms fit for the Europe of the future.
The OSF full report can be found here.
