Geopolitics will not wait, reform cannot hurry
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 has cast a veil of uncertainty over the future of the European Union (EU). The return of interstate war to the European continent has profoundly reshaped debates surrounding European integration, security, and the future boundaries of the Union. This changing geopolitical environment has renewed political and academic attention toward the EU’s regional integration initiatives, particularly enlargement. Long regarded as one of the EU’s most successful foreign policy instruments, enlargement has nevertheless slowed considerably since the major eastern enlargements of 2004 and 2007. Marked by doubts over the EU’s absorption capacity, and by the persistent enlargement fatigue, the policy entered a prolonged period of stagnation. Yet Russia’s invasion has enhanced enlargement’s strategic salience, with accession increasingly framed as a geopolitical necessity. At the same time, scholarship emphasizes that the EU’s enlargement logic remains fundamentally unchanged: accession continues to rely on strict conditionality, gradual acquis alignment, and a merit-based process. The central challenge is therefore no longer whether enlargement matters strategically, but how can the EU reconcile geopolitical urgency with the slow and demanding nature of accession.
This renewed geopolitical urgency quickly translated into political action. In record time, the EU granted candidate status to Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, reinvigorated stalled accession processes in the Western Balkans, and prompted other countries, such as Iceland and Armenia, to reconsider their relationship with the Union.
Yet, in practice, enlargement remains long, technical, and deeply transformative. Candidate countries must reform judicial systems, overhaul public administrations, and align with the vast and intricate EU acquis. Political will in Brussels has grown, but the fundamentals have not changed. Accession still follows a strict merit-based logic, with no real shortcuts — a reality that increasingly frustrates societies asked to wait. This result in a persistent tension between the EU’s strategic urgency and the demanding pace of reform required for membership. How can the EU resolve this dilemma, and take the strategic choice of enlargement without lowering its standards? In this post, I argue that EU agencies can bridge this gap by enabling gradual, sector-specific participation in EU governance without lowering accession standards.
Making differentiated integration real
In this context, differentiated integration, while definitely not a new idea, has regained thrust as a possible answer. The integration below the threshold of full membership can represent a permanent alternative to complete integration into the EU or a temporary differentiation, offering a more viable path to EU membership. This concept has gained more traction recently, even among policymakers. We have seen, for example, the Commission mentioning the gradual integration as an “important element in preparing enlargement countries well ahead of accession”, or more recently, the proposals put forward by both EU and EU candidate policymakers to have a reverse or partial enlargement, or the creation of alternatives such as an associated membership status.
Differentiated integration thus can represent an answer to this dilemma. By granting candidate countries “checkpoint” rewards as they advance in their reforms, the EU can preserve merit-based conditionality while making progress more visible and politically meaningful.
The logic of gradual integration is already on the table. The challenge now is to operationalise it in concrete institutional terms, identifying where and how candidate countries can participate meaningfully in EU structures before full membership.
EU agencies as vessels of differentiated integration
Decentralized agencies (hereafter EU agencies) have become central pillars of EU governance. Nearly 40 agencies operate across almost all sectors of the acquis: justice and home affairs, banking supervision, energy cooperation, and many more. In addition, their role in EU governance have widely expanded to become central component of it and now operates in every step of the formation of the acquis, from its development to its implementation and enforcement. In some cases, they even have acquired regulatory competences, including the ability to draft or adopt legally binding rules.
EU agencies are particularly well-suited venue for differentiated integration to take place. They help tackle the enlargement dilemma for mainly two reasons.
- The regulatory dimension of EU agencies
EU agencies possess the sector-specific expertise required to support candidate countries in the adoption and implementation of EU rules. Enlargement requires strong administrative capacity to be able to effectively adopt and implement EU acquis.
EU agencies provide capacity-building activities for the candidate countries through, for example, dedicated training programmes, or peer reviews of their administrative practices. Through these interactions, candidate country officials familiarise with EU standards required for enlargement well before formal full membership. This offers strong support for their path toward EU membership.
Due to their technical expertise, EU agencies have become a key component for EU regulatory power. The European Union heavily relies on them to promote administrative reforms and regulatory adaptation in EU candidate countries through capacity building activities. Those activities are very diverse, ranging from the promotion of gender equality with the support for the creation of a regional platform for gender equality or of gender equality index from the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), to the provision of formations on EU maritime legislation and expert visits to EU candidate countries from the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA).
In this regard, EU agencies are not very different from other EU policies and programmes, such as for instance the (IPA) Instrument Pre Accession programme or the TAIEX and Twinning instruments.
- EU agencies organizational dimension
Yet, in addition to this regulatory dimension, EU agencies add an important organizational dimension. EU agencies are relatively permeable institutions. In EU central institutions, namely the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament, participation generally coincides with full membership. Unlike such bodies, agencies often allow third countries to take part in decision-making structures, typically without voting rights. Such participation is granted on a case-by-case, sector-by-sector basis and can be calibrated to reflect progress in specific policy areas.
This flexibility makes EU agencies well suited to differentiated participation. A candidate country advancing in the electricity acquis, for example, could join the relevant EU energy agency, ACER, the European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators, while progress in financial supervision could open access to EU financial agencies. Reform progress would thus be rewarded not only through the provisional closure of negotiation chapters, but also through structured access to EU bodies.
In this sense, differentiated participation through EU agencies would not introduce a fundamentally new logic. The enlargement process is already structured around sectors through the negotiation of chapters and clusters, with progress depending on each candidate country’s alignment with the EU acquis. Participation in EU agencies would therefore reinforce existing accession dynamics by creating additional incentives for sectoral reform and by operationalising the differentiated integration already embedded in enlargement by adding an organizational dimension.
Beyond the symbolic value of participating in selected EU bodies, important for sustaining public support, agency involvement enables candidate countries to contribute to the preparation, implementation, and enforcement of the very same acquis they are expected to adopt. EU agencies therefore complement the traditional regulatory dimension of enlargement with a tangible organisational one, narrowing the gap between candidacy and membership. They provide a practical way to reconcile the EU’s strategic interest in enlargement with high accession standards and a merit-based approach, and can offer a more viable path toward EU membership, or represent a permanent alternative to full participation to the Union.
Despite this potential, the EU has not systematically mobilised agencies as enlargement instruments. My research shows that participation remains uneven across sectors and countries and often depends on the preferences and autonomy of individual agencies.
Enlargement beyond rhetoric
This post advances a concrete institutional proposal: EU agencies can operationalise differentiated integration. They function both as vehicles for regulatory export and as permeable entry points into EU governance, making them strategic instruments for the next phase of enlargement.
While the empirical impact of EU agencies on the enlargement process remains underexplored, by involving candidate countries in sectoral governance structures, EU agencies could help transform enlargement from a distant promise into a structured, progressive path toward full integration, without lowering standards or bypassing conditions.
The political window created by Russia’s invasion will not remain indefinitely. If the EU intends to act strategically, it must move beyond rhetoric and make more systematic use of the instruments already at its disposal, including EU agencies as vehicles for gradual sectoral integration.
Matis Poussardin is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Geneva, specialising in the role of European Union decentralised agencies in European integration and the external governance of the EU. His research explores the dynamics of EU enlargement, regional integration in Europe, and the development of transgovernmental cooperation.