The countries of the European Union have accepted that it is inevitable that new member states will join, Sweden’s minister for European affairs has said.
“All the EU member states don’t talk about ‘if’, rather about ‘how’ and ‘when’,” Jessika Roswall said.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed views of enlargement by demonstrating that it is important for “security” and “the new geopolitical situation”, she said.
Ukraine and neighbouring Moldova were named official candidate countries for membership last year. This brought to eight the number of candidate countries, most of which have been waiting for progress in their membership hopes for many years through a period of “enlargement fatigue” in western European countries prior to Russia’s invasion.
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Since then, the newly-revived enlargement process has kick-started serious consideration of how the 27-member EU may need to reform itself internally so it can continue to work smoothly if its membership grows.
“The EU must be ready,” Ms Roswall said.
In a speech at the Institute of International and European Affairs during a visit to Dublin this week, the minister laid out Sweden’s view of what should change.
Germany recently called for an end to the requirement for unanimous agreement on matters of foreign policy and taxation and to move to qualified majority voting instead, to speed up decision-making and prevent individual countries from frequently vetoing decisions.
Sweden, however, supports removing unanimity only for some matters of foreign policy – for making decisions on sanctions, human rights and overseas civilian missions. Like Ireland, the country advocates that unanimity on taxation should be retained.
Even though the EU has unanimity now, nevertheless “it has been efficient and we have also been able to reach decisions”, Ms Roswall stressed.
She predicted that enlargement would require reform to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (Cap) farming payments scheme and to cohesion funding, which distributes money to the union’s less developed regions.
As the newer states are poorer and some such as Ukraine are major agricultural producers, if they joined without the system being changed it would entail large reductions to current beneficiaries of the programmes. In the past, newer countries have been phased in to the EU system to make the effect more gradual.
Sweden has long called for reform of the Cap irrespective of enlargement, and a previous government in 2007 even called for most farming subsidies to be abolished outright.
Ms Roswall met her Irish counterpart minister Peter Burke on Tuesday to discuss the policy positions that Ireland and Sweden share.
“Small countries need to stick together sometimes, because that’s how the EU functions,” she said.
