Grandstand. In three days, the European Union has undertaken to open its doors to three new countries, including Ukraine. The task will not be easy. There is even such a challenge here that the Union will not be able to meet it without completely reinventing itself, but this major turning point remains practically unnoticed. In the din of war, the President of the Commission was barely heard to announce the news in kyiv on 8 April. “Ukraine is marching towards a European future”said Ursula von der Leyen then and, the following Monday, the breakthrough of Marine Le Pen in the first round of the French presidential election totally eclipsed the delivery of membership questionnaires to Moldova and Georgia.
Saying ” yes “ to the Ukrainians, the Union has nevertheless taken the risk of accepting within its ranks a country of 44 million inhabitants, totally destroyed by Russian shelling and whose borders will long remain as disputed as they are fragile. We have taken the enormous risk of importing an unresolved conflict into the Union and thus becoming part of it. But that’s not all.
We forced ourselves to take the same risk with Georgia and Moldova because we couldn’t seem to abandon them to Vladimir Putin’s imperial nostalgia, and that’s not all. In three days, we have thus forced ourselves to complete the ongoing negotiations with Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and even Kosovo much faster than we would like. , six more countries. We are running, in a word, to paralysis, because our institutions, designed for six States, while the Union today has twenty-seven, are already so exhausted that they could no longer function at all with some thirty -five Member States with profoundly different levels of economic and political development.
Yes, we put our finger in a suicidal gear but, except to play the ostrich, to flee our responsibilities and to give up defending democracy, we could not turn our back on the Ukrainians. We could escape even less than we had been able to when Poland, the Baltic countries and Central Europe were knocking on our doors. But how do we now meet the challenge we have set ourselves?
One-off cooperations first
Well, it’s simple. We will only succeed by ceasing to think that we could all move forward at the same pace, all the time and in all areas. It’s impossible. This will remain so for many decades, but we can, on the other hand, form groups of countries wishing to go further and faster towards common objectives, and this multi-speed Europe could take shape in two ways.
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