This article is part of SHAPEDEM-EU, an EU-funded project that aims to rethink and reshape EU democracy support policies in its eastern and southern neighborhoods. It is also part of the European Democracy Hub initiative run by Carnegie Europe and the European Partnership for Democracy.
As the EU prepares for its next expansion, it needs to update the Copenhagen criteria that candidate countries must meet to join the union. One pillar of the criteria relates to democracy requirements, and these are in particular need of revision if the EU’s revived enlargement process is to fulfill its potential in incentivizing political reforms.
In particular, the EU needs a wider approach to supporting democracy in the candidate countries that goes beyond the existing accession criteria. These existing criteria are highly formal and institutional, while good-quality democracy requires a more organically rooted process of reform with many features that are not quantified in the current criteria. Widening the EU’s entry conditions would allow them to play a more effective role in the union’s resurrected enlargement project.
Beyond Gradual Integration
There is widespread agreement that the EU enlargement process needs to change as the union advances in its preaccession preparations with the current candidate states. Indeed, this is now the ritually repeated assertion heard from policymakers and analysts alike. This need is due both to the era’s sharper geopolitical tensions and to enlargement’s more general atrophy in recent years. Few would disagree with the widely shared conviction that Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which has revived the EU’s enthusiasm for expansion, also invites a commitment to a fundamentally different form of enlargement.
And yet, as the EU is set formally to open accession negotiations with Moldova and Ukraine in June 2024 two years after granting them candidate status, the enlargement process remains largely unchanged. The need to adapt the preaccession process applies to many policy areas related to enlargement, and analysts and policymakers have offered many suggestions of how to do so. Most of these revolve around speeding up candidates’ de facto inclusion in EU policies, introducing forms of staged accession, and incorporating security issues into enlargement. Some advocate a target date for the candidates’ membership in parallel with internal EU reforms to help make accession succeed. Others call for more differentiated integration based on distinct tiers and concentric circles.
One question that has received less attention relates to the role of the Copenhagen criteria in applicant states’ democratization. The criteria were established during the 1993 European Council summit in Copenhagen and consist of three main conditions that a country has to meet to join the EU. Political criteria stipulate that a state must guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and the protection of minorities through stable institutions. Economic criteria require a country to have a functioning market economy and be able to cope with competitive pressures and market forces within the EU. And legislative conditions stipulate that a country must be able to adopt and implement the EU’s acquis, or body of law and policies.
Thirty years since the Copenhagen criteria were introduced, political dynamics and knowledge about democratization have evolved considerably. Three decades of experience and lessons in where the EU has succeeded and failed in spurring democratization can help sharpen the union’s political conditionality. The EU needs to update the criteria if it is to develop a democracy support policy that is more balanced, more comprehensive, and more in tune with current geopolitical imperatives.
Curiously, while there is wide consensus that the EU’s new, geopolitically driven accession process needs to be different from previous rounds of enlargement, little consideration has been given to improving democracy-related entry conditions or making the accession process itself more democratic. The large number of proposals on reforming enlargement are all concerned with the sequencing of rewards and reforms with a view to the gradual inclusion of candidates in various EU policies, structures, and funding schemes. They do not open the black box of conditionality itself. Nor do they question or reassess the kind of democracy that the EU is promoting or stipulating as a key precondition of entry.
In previous enlargements, the EU implemented these political conditions without precise, quantitative benchmarks, and this resulted in much contested ambiguity on when candidates were ready to join. The Copenhagen criteria also failed to guarantee that democratic standards would continue to be met after accession, which ended up proving highly problematic for the EU.
Thus, the debate needs to look beyond the now routine assertion that new members should be brought into the EU gradually and with tangible, short-term rewards before full membership. There is a need for more reflection on the content and essence of the reform processes that candidates are expected to undertake as well as wider public engagement with and oversight of the process. Imbalances and mistakes at this level have been just as problematic as the lack of transitional or intermediate rewards for candidates along the path to full membership.
Beyond sequenced reform and gradual integration, the EU needs a qualitatively different approach to democracy that draws on the last three decades of experience in democracy policies, perspectives from citizens in candidate countries, and wider democratization trends. The Copenhagen criteria foresee heavy regulatory and institutional reform but in other senses are too narrow in leaving out more qualitative aspects of wider democratic reform. What is needed is a broader but also more nuanced set of democracy criteria that amount to a reconfigured strategy for democracy support in the incipient round of accession.
A Patchy Record
In the years after their introduction, the Copenhagen criteria played a dual role of both guiding candidate countries along their path of democratic reform and protecting the EU itself. In this way, the criteria helped convince hesitant EU member states to support the accession process. Yet, many observers criticized the conditions for being too broad and open to highly subjective interpretation. The EU declined to offer firm or unequivocal definitions of the democracy toward which it sought to push candidates. Details of democratic reform were introduced mainly through the European Commission’s formal opinions and annual reports on candidates’ progress and readiness for membership. While the EU gradually made the Copenhagen criteria more precise, they continued to be a moving target for candidates. Moreover, the democracy criteria invited qualitative assessment that was lacking in EU evaluation benchmarks.
The general view is that in the Central and Eastern European states, conditionality did not succeed as well as expected in sustaining democratization. The criteria neglected to stimulate domestic demand for reformist norms and laws. In fact, the process of transposing EU law hollowed out much local democratic engagement to the benefit of executives in charge of technocratic harmonization. This led to a much heavier focus on the rule of law than on other areas of wider democratic reform, like civic empowerment or party-political pluralism. The application of the criteria often lacked precision, making it difficult to pinpoint their impact.
A widespread concern is that the EU did not apply the political criteria comprehensively or rigorously enough. There was too much uncertainty and complexity in the process for meeting the accession conditions when it came to timing, rewards, and what was really being asked of the candidates in terms of democratization. The general criticism is that the criteria were too broad and imprecise to lock in high-quality democratic reform, and that this imprecision explained subsequent postaccession backsliding in Central and Eastern European states.
In the Western Balkans, the EU has for years allowed candidates to progress along the integration path with only partial compliance, weakening the union’s ability to induce meaningful reforms. The step between EU governments agreeing to open accession talks and substantive thematic negotiations actually beginning has become more drawn out and uncertain. These thematic negotiations have still not started with Albania and North Macedonia, despite EU governments agreeing to start talks four years ago.
In spite of all of these widely acknowledged shortcomings, the EU is essentially now using the same political conditionality toward Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and those Western Balkan states whose accession prospects appear to have been unblocked since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Experts note that the Copenhagen criteria assume generally favorable background conditions, which are not present in all candidates, while the acquis’s expansion over the years entails higher compliance costs for governments. One relevant point is that research on the conditions of EU membership has focused much more on the incentives and structures that drive governments’ reactions to the entry criteria than on the actual content of the conditions.
Copenhagen Plus
The EU is making relatively little progress on correcting these limitations. On March 20, 2024, the commission issued a communication on pre-enlargement reforms and policy reviews. This adopted an admirably comprehensive approach and stressed the need for substantial institutional and policy reforms for the next round of accession, but it made no mention of the need to rethink the EU’s approach to democracy support in the acceding states.
The EU needs to broaden the Copenhagen criteria into what might be termed a “Copenhagen plus” approach. Part of this need derives from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and particular threats to other candidate states as well as the more general securitized dynamics that increasingly predominate in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. Another part of the case for new approaches to fostering democracy is quite separate from the war: the EU now has many years’ experience of operating the Copenhagen criteria and plentiful evidence of their shortcomings and imbalances.
This kind of adjustment and broadening of the Copenhagen criteria has happened before. The European Council added entry requirements related to administrative and judicial structures in 1995 and a “good neighbor” condition in 1999—the latter in an effort to prevent acceding states from importing conflicts into the union.
Further such adjustment is now pressing. Political trends have changed significantly since the criteria were designed. In a decade and a half of global democratic recession, regimes have become more adept at blocking and reversing democratic reforms and neutralizing the agency of pro-democracy actors. As political trends have made it more evident that democratization can easily reverse, there is a clear need for wider democratic engagement in the accession process and deeper political reforms that go beyond formalistic institutional changes.
Copenhagen plus should not be seen as a strategy for burdening governments with a lot of additional harmonization requirements. Proponents of enlargement are rightly attentive to the risk of skeptical member states rhetorically supporting accession while insisting on stricter conditionality as a way of delaying progress. Rather, this approach is intended as a recalibration of the conditions toward a policy of positively empowering society and thus encouraging more sustainable progress toward candidates’ membership. To this end, the Copenhagen plus approach should bring several layers of improvement.
The EU needs to go beyond the quantitative assessment of the number of legislative proposals adopted. Previous enlargement rounds have demonstrated that the EU tends to measure reforms on paper rather than in practice and needs to consider qualitative aspects of a participative political culture as well. The EU needs to move away from overly general demands for candidate governments to “depolarize,” “de-oligarchize,” and the like, because these requirements are difficult to measure, are not met by member states themselves, and have little chance of being met fully by candidate countries.
Rather, in the early stages of the accession process, the EU should home in on helping to build participative pluralism at the societal level, because it is this kind of democratic breadth that has been most effective in limiting autocratization and democratic backsliding. To this end, the EU should both make the accession process itself more participative and recalibrate political conditions to improve democratic participation in candidate countries. While this strategy alone would not suffice to guarantee full democratic engagement in candidate countries, it would stimulate democratic participation mechanisms in a way that would energize both the accession process and postaccession democratic politics.
The EU needs to support and insist on stronger bottom-up democratic accountability mechanisms—in general and more specifically in relation to accession preparations. Once the accession process kicks off, discussions are heavily institutional. They center on bilateral EU-to-government negotiations that focus primarily on each candidate’s institutional reforms and legal harmonization with the EU. Previous enlargement rounds have suffered from a lack of formal mechanisms for wider, direct democratic participation and effective public accountability over the enlargement process.
Analysts have suggested that enlargement needs to be more people centered as the distribution of power in society will impact the enlargement process more than formal institutional details will. The EU needs to focus more on working with citizens to empower reform possibilities—both for democratic reform in general and for accession-related reforms in particular—rather than holding candidates in a near-eternal waiting room until they meet very detailed harmonization rules. This line needs to be given real substance through a reconfigured democracy support strategy.
While the EU naturally needs to focus mainly on formal relations with governments and should not seek to dictate the shape of local political dynamics, it can do more to foster wider and more balanced processes of political reform. Bottom-up public pressure and civic oversight mechanisms are particularly necessary and relevant for the EU’s Eastern enlargement as fragile democracies like Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine strive to ensure alignment with the EU amid heavy geopolitical pressure from Russia. This also means harnessing such accountability mechanisms to help resist external pressure on domestic politics—especially as outside threats to the EU accession process become more severe.
Bottom-up accountability mechanisms are also needed to monitor much more rigorously how governments use preaccession funding. A cardinal lesson from previous rounds of enlargement is that governments can easily capture cohesion and other funds, undermining democratic quality. In the present authors’ extensive consultations with civil society organizations (CSOs), groups made it clear that they do not want the criteria to be implemented in a loose or imprecise way for geopolitical reasons. Robust civic engagement needs to be framed around the issues that are important to citizens’ everyday lives more than around the details of accession as such. It is especially important to include voices critical of the EU and encourage them to debate their concerns over enlargement. The risk in previous rounds has been that CSOs that deal mainly with EU membership get co-opted into working with governments on technical preparations for enlargement to the detriment of civil society’s role as a critical counterpower.
A set of Copenhagen plus democracy criteria would build in more participatory conditions for democracy and insist on accession itself involving more citizen engagement. The widened conditions could stipulate that candidate governments need to attain certain benchmarks that measure participative democracy and the dispersal of power through society. They could require candidate governments to hold citizen assemblies both on issues of enlargement and on more general aspects of the democratic reform agenda. The EU could also insist on citizen initiatives like participatory local governance in the parts of the accession process related to decentralization. Such steps would widen the scope for direct, democratic participation and help guarantee public oversight over the enlargement process.
The Copenhagen plus approach could also usefully sharpen the leverage of civil society funding. While the EU encourages candidate countries to include CSOs in decisionmaking processes, civil society has no formalized participatory role in accession. Yet, it has a strong appetite to be better included in the process. To give two examples: in 2023, Ukrainian CSOs criticized the EU for excluding them from support for the Rebuild Ukraine initiative, which provides humanitarian aid to Ukraine’s defenders, civilians, and refugees; and in 2022, a group of Georgian CSOs published an open letter to the Georgian government pressing it to make the EU’s preaccession questionnaire and the government’s answers publicly available.
Most EU accession aid has traditionally gone to building states’ administrative capacities to harmonize with EU laws. Such aid is presented as democracy assistance but has actually proved problematic from the point of view of local buy-in and direct democratic engagement. In the next round of enlargement, the EU must make more effort to ensure that state capacity goes hand in hand with civil society and citizen accountability over state bodies. At present, the EU has started channeling large increases in funding to candidate governments, while several of these same governments restrict CSO involvement in European initiatives. A minimum stipulated share of preaccession funding should go to civic actors to support such accountability, and the EU should set a requirement that the huge number of institutional support programs that preaccession entails all include civic participative elements. A similar broadening of civic support could be built into the new European Peace Facility funding that the EU has started to provide to candidate states.
In a similar vein, the EU needs to focus more of its efforts on nurturing local ownership and building the capacity of local actors. The union could require candidate governments to invite independent civil society actors to the table for case-by-case thematic discussions. CSO representatives reported to us that they are constantly alerting European officials to risks and adverse trends that require a shift in tactics but that the EU ignores these concerns to maintain its standard enlargement schedule. After over a decade of extensive cooperation with the so-called Association Trio of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, the EU has gained knowledge and reliable partners and does not need to develop more special platforms like the Civil Society Forum to formalize civil society’s inclusion. The involvement of civil society must have substantively meaningful monitoring functions to avoid the risk of participation-related conditionality becoming mere window-dressing.
This new Copenhagen plus approach would fit well with a staged process of accession because of its focus on the incremental strengthening of reform dynamics from society upward. It could also be linked to the kind of reversibility logic that several EU leaders have advocated. When the government of a candidate country resists civil society inclusion or tries to limit the share of funds that go outside the government, the EU should be willing to pause the country’s progress toward membership or even reverse gains already made. Moreover, while the EU’s punitive or negative conditionality is often seen as detrimental to a candidate country in general, the EU could more subtly and helpfully redirect funding to civil society if a government fails to meet democratic reform priorities or becomes more authoritarian.
This approach could help keep channeling funding to candidate countries that move in an antidemocratic direction. Continuous democracy support would allow expert groups and civil society to persist with their democratic reform agendas in difficult political contexts and could help remove blockages in enlargement farther down the line. Besides, such support would serve as a preventive mechanism against the kind of disinformation prevalent in both Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans that often portrays the EU as having abandoned its partners and being unlikely ever to follow through on its membership promises.
Such an approach to democracy support would also help build in guardrails against possible democratic erosion even after accession has been secured. Wider democratic participation in the enlargement process should be structured in a way that helps strengthen societal resilience and prepare candidate countries not only for accession but also for membership. The last decade has shown the challenges posed by EU member states like Hungary and Poland that have been beset by illiberal populism and authoritarian tendencies. Developing democratic resilience in enlargement societies throughout the accession process should serve as a preventive mechanism for postaccession democratic politics.
Conclusion
In sum, these ideas for a Copenhagen plus strategy would sharpen and improve the EU’s accession-related democracy support. The union’s emphasis on formal, institutional reforms is necessary and is understandably the main focus of government-to-government diplomacy but needs to be complemented by stronger support for participative democratic change. The EU has begun to emphasize such initiatives in efforts to reform itself—witness the union’s new generation of citizen panels on different aspects of EU legislation—but has done little to infuse the accession process with the same participative ethos. Officials insist they do much to engage with local civil society actors, and this is undoubtedly the case. However, the EU could usefully do more to foreground these participative aspects as a formal strand of its accession process.
The EU cannot and should not seek to determine the shape of local politics, but it can and should place greater priority on candidate governments creating participative spaces—both to debate enlargement in particular and more generally. In doing so, the EU can help build locally driven demands for enlargement and democratic reform while focusing more assertively on formal institutional changes after such citizen engagement has been developed. Formal aspects of democratic reform should be the result of local engagement and not its forerunner, as tends to be the case in current EU sequencing.
Moreover, these forms of building civic participation and influence should come with more formally guaranteed EU responses. That is, the union must do more to ensure concrete rewards and accession progress when citizens and civil society actors engage more strongly to defend democratic values. If the EU is to make the accession conditions more people centered, it must also make them more two-way by placing requirements on itself as much as on candidate countries.
The complexity of current EU enlargement amid the war in Ukraine makes it distinctive and in need of new strategies for building reform dynamics. Among other strands of policy, this requirement should encourage the EU to develop a more comprehensive and reconfigured approach to the democracy-building aspects of accession. It is striking how little attention has been given to this need so far, even after so many years in which the democracy promotion aspects of enlargement have evidently been backfiring. In a Copenhagen plus ethos, the EU must aim to build momentum for democratization through sustainable reform dynamics among different actors, rather than simply asking for a lot of highly formal institutional change right at the beginning of the process. Such change should be the outcome of incrementally deepening democratic pluralism, not the precursor to it.
Elene Panchulidze is a research coordinator at the European Partnership for Democracy, where she oversees global research on democracy and leads the European Democracy Hub initiative.
The authors wish to thank Frank Schimmelfennig, Giselle Bosse, Veronica Anghel, Erik Jones, Michael Emerson, Elena Ventura, Rikard Jozwiak, Irakli Sirbiladze, and Carlotta Magoga for their helpful input.
