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Pushing the EU's Boundaries: Enlargement and Foreign Policy Actorness after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

2023; Wiley; Volume: 61; Issue: S1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jcms.13540

1468-5965

Nicole Scicluna, Stefan Auer,

Post-Soviet Geopolitical Dynamics

On 23 June 2022, the European Council, acting on the Commission's recommendation, granted Ukraine the status of a candidate for European Union (EU) membership. This decision came only 4 months after Ukraine submitted its application, which, in turn, came less than a week after Russia's full-scale invasion of the country on 24 February 2022. The granting of candidate status was emblematic of the EU's strong support for Ukraine in the face of Russia's war of aggression. The speed with which it happened was unprecedented. And, notwithstanding the EU's past encouragement of Ukraine's ‘European perspective’, were it not for the war, it would not have happened at all. Of course, candidate status is not membership, as Turkey and the countries of the Western Balkans can attest (Anghel and Džankić, 2023; Kmezić, 2020). And whilst unanimous in their decision of June 2022, several member states have baulked at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's request for a fast-tracked accession, noting instead the importance of candidates adhering to the standard procedures and fulfilling accession criteria in full. Moreover, the revival of the enlargement question has revived debates about internal EU reform, with leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron emphasizing the need for institutional and procedural reforms to prepare the EU to integrate new members (Anghel and Džankić, 2023, p. 496). Given internal divisions over issues such as qualified majority voting in foreign policy matters, the reform debate has the potential to greatly delay the enlargement project. Consequently, it is not possible to put a timeframe on Ukraine's accession. In fact, it still cannot be said with complete certainty that it will ever be an EU member state. In this article, we use Ukraine's relationship with the EU as a point of departure to probe the Union's foreign policy actorness. Whilst the war in Ukraine put enlargement back on the table, lack of clarity over the EU's final borders – a hallmark of the post-Cold War EU's relations with its Eastern neighbourhood – remains. Thus, two key questions animate this study. First, what can (and should) the EU offer Ukraine? Second, how does this relate to the evolution of EU actorness, including in the realm of enlargement policy? In seeking to answer these questions, we use Hill's (1993) concept of the ‘capability–expectations gap’, which he developed 30 years ago to describe the possibilities and limits of the EU's foreign policy actorness. His approach remains prescient, though even Hill himself may have been too optimistic about what the EU can achieve on the world stage. Applying the capability–expectations gap to enlargement policy – often described as the EU's most successful foreign policy tool (Moravcsik and Vachudova, 2003; Vachudova, 2014) – we argue that the EU continues to over-promise and under-deliver. Reversing this pattern is vital to the EU's credibility as a foreign policy actor, though it seems unattainable owing to internal political dynamics that see key actors pushing towards ever more ambitious, and elusive, goals. The purposes of enlargement policy, which include securing peace in the EU's neighbourhood, assisting the domestic reform processes of neighbouring states and the moral imperative of fulfilling the promise inherent in the concept of a ‘European’ union, will not be served by a vague rhetorical commitment to Ukraine's future in the EU. They may even be undermined by an insistence on major EU reform as a precondition of enlargement. Instead, the Union should set itself to resolving the in/out dilemma articulated by Karen Smith (2005) nearly 20 years ago – not only in relation to Ukraine but also in relation to all candidates and potential candidates. A Europe of ‘open, or porous borders’ (Zielonka, 2017, p. 641) – celebrated until recently by scholars and practitioners alike – is no longer fit for purpose as it confronts wars of territorial conquest in its Eastern neighbourhood. The article proceeds as follows. We begin by revisiting the capability–expectations gap in light of the war in Ukraine. Current conditions lead us to suggest that, not only does the gap persist, it has grown. We explicate this claim in relation to both (self-inflicted) heightened expectations and (externally induced) lowered capabilities. This discussion takes us back to the question of Ukraine's future EU membership, which we relate to enlargement policy more generally. We conclude with brief reflections on the dilemmas raised by the prospect of enlargement and on how the war is likely to influence the EU's polity building project. What follows, then, is a call for rethinking Europe's place in the world, as well as its self-understanding (Della Sala, 2023). The EU can no longer afford blurred boundaries, which only serve to keep the space between current members and Russia in a state of limbo. Europe's ‘constructive ambiguity’ in this area has proved destructive. In fact, it is not much of an overstatement to say that for Ukraine, the EU's ambiguous neighbourhood policies proved catastrophic. As the EU oscillated between being a reluctant empire of sorts and a post-national state in the making, its influence in the East reinforced Ukraine's vulnerability as an ‘in-between’ nation. Already in 2014, Europe's soft power proved sufficient to trigger the Ukrainian ‘revolution of dignity’ but was impotent when it came to protecting Ukraine's territorial integrity vis-à-vis Russia (Auer, 2022, p. 109). As it was at the time of Hill's seminal article, the EU's foreign policy actorness remains limited in profound ways. It is not a security actor in the sense that NATO or individual member states are, and it is not likely to become one. This reality has only been confirmed by the war in Ukraine (Genschel et al., 2023; Orenstein, 2023, pp. 336–337). Rather than raising unrealistic expectations on military and defence matters, the EU ought to focus on maximizing the capabilities it does have. Revitalizing enlargement policy is prime amongst these capabilities. A ‘geopolitical’ EU need not be the polity that supplies fighter jets to Ukraine, but it ought to be one that has clearly defined borders and a clear timeline for bringing current outsiders in. The emergence of a revisionist Russia has challenged the EU's ‘foundational myth that peace and prosperity were guaranteed through cooperation and interdependence’ (Della Sala, 2023, p. 368). Only an EU confident in its borders and able to offer credible promises to future members can meet this challenge. Re-reading Christopher Hill (1993) reveals the extent to which the world and Europe's place in it have changed over the last three decades. Hill, an erstwhile sceptic, now appears to have been overly optimistic both in respect of Europe's potential to shape the world and in respect of the largely benign nature of international relations. To be sure, Hill was not alone in making such optimistic assumptions in the 1990s and after. In the mid-2000s, Mark Leonard (2006) sought to explain ‘Why Europe will run the 21st century’ in an eponymous bestseller. Similarly, Andrew Moravcsik (2007) asserted that ‘anyone speculating about the future of the EU should start with one simple fact: it is a success of epochal proportions’, highlighting EU expansion as ‘the surest exercise in democracy promotion since the end of the Cold War’. The future was bright, as enlargement was ‘proceeding down the western Balkans’ and ‘positive influences [were] felt from Ukraine to Morocco’. As recently as late 2020, Moravcsik still explained ‘Why Europe wins’, proclaiming boldly that ‘nowhere is Europe's ability to confound skeptics clearer than in foreign policy’. Defying the naysayers, Brussels proved ‘smarter than Beijing, London, Moscow and Washington’. In Moravcsik's words, ‘Europeans have succeeded by deploying nonmilitary capabilities that they wield more effectively than anyone else in the world today’. Commenting on Zelenskyy's electoral victory in 2019, which cemented Ukraine's European ambitions, Moravcsik was adamant that ‘Europe alone possesses the nonmilitary instruments needed to prevail against Russian President Vladimir Putin’ (Moravcsik, 2020, pp. 47–48). Hill's optimism about Europe as a foreign policy actor was more equivocal. He introduced his essay by praising Hedley Bull's realist arguments about supranationalism not working in foreign policy. ‘Europeans would need to develop a military capability’, wrote Hill rephrasing Bull, ‘if they were ever to be taken seriously on the great issues of international relations’ (Hill, 1993, p. 305). Such a capacity had been envisaged by the European Defence Community in the 1950s. However, following that project's failure, what developed instead was a division of labour that was hugely consequential, yet tends to be underplayed. From the outset, the project of European integration was accompanied, and made possible, by NATO. That is, the former's emphasis on ever-closer economic and political union was enabled by the latter's provision of a US-backed security guarantee. Recognizing this, Hill cautioned ‘against expecting too much of the European Community as an international actor’. His analysis of the ‘capability–expectations gap’ proved prescient. Yet, the Union continues to lack awareness of this reality, which presents it ‘with difficult choices and experiences that are the more painful for not being fully comprehended’. Hill aimed ‘to sketch a more realistic picture of what the Community does in the world than that presented either by its more enthusiastic supporters or by the demandeurs beyond its borders’ (Hill, 1993, p. 306). Thirty years later, and in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we aim to do something similar. Then as now, ‘the whole question of who is going to be in and who outside’ of the EU remains uncertain, impacting on our ability ‘to say anything durable or precise’ about Europe's ‘wider geo-political areas’. Yet we cannot ignore the question. With great foresight, Hill cautioned against the application of ‘neo-functional and neo-institutional approaches’, popular in integration theory, to EU external relations, in which its actorness continues to be constrained (Hill, 1993, p. 308). Even if in a growing number of foreign policy areas the EU is no longer solely intergovernmental, it is still seldom ‘more than the sum of what the Member States severally decide’ (Hill, 1993, p. 309). Yet, such scepticism did not stop Hill from compiling an extensive list of Europe's ‘conceivable future functions’ (Hill, 1993, p. 312). In fact, given his own premises, it is striking how Hill underestimated both the power of Russia and that of the United States, whilst overestimating Europe's potential. Noting that ‘the Soviet Union has disappeared, and that the United States is in no position to exert worldwide leadership’, the first potential task that Hill assigned to Europe was ‘a replacement for the USSR in the global balance of power’. Though this was not yet a world of ‘post-power politics’, the main challenge that Europeans were to face, in Hill's account, was to counterbalance ‘American strength globally’ – a task for which Europe was uniquely placed, as the potential conflicts were ‘more likely to revolve around economics and diplomacy than armed might’. It followed from this, as Hill's second task for Europe, that it would be ‘a regional pacifier’, acting ‘as mediator/coercive arbiter when the peace of the whole region seems under threat’ (Hill, 1993, p. 312). Third, Hill expected Europe to act as ‘global intervenor’, stepping up to defend European interests ‘on occasions by military force but more often with economic and political instruments’. The fourth task enumerated by Hill is of particular relevance to Ukraine today: Europe as a ‘mediator of conflict’. The EU's suitability for this task was putatively based on its ‘singular advantage of not being perceived as a superpower and potential hegemon’ (Hill, 1993, p. 313). The Union has (at least thus far) failed to live up to this vision. In fact, in relation to Russia's self-claimed sphere of influence, the EU managed to be perceived as a ‘potential hegemon’ without having the corresponding power to protect its protégée, Ukraine. It was, after all, pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's refusal to sign an Association Agreement with the EU in 2013 that triggered the Euromaidan revolution. Whilst the ousting of Yanukovych cemented Ukraine's pro-European orientation, the EU did not have enough power or determination to stop Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 or the subsequent extension of the conflict into Eastern Ukraine. To be sure, the EU was caught off-guard by the dramatic series of events that followed Yanukovych's abandonment of the Association Agreement. However, the degree to which it was unprepared is itself an important part of the problem – revealing an ongoing misapprehension of Russian perceptions of the EU. In relation to Ukraine, at least, Russia saw the EU as a hostile actor, rather than a partner. It did not much distinguish between NATO and the EU in terms of the undesirability of their respective expansions (Kuzio, 2017, pp. 104, 110). As Putin argued in a lengthy essay, ‘step by step, Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia’. Ukraine's ‘forced change of identity’, he wrote, was ‘comparable … to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us’ (Putin, 2021; see also Reid, 2022, p. 54). There are good reasons to support the thesis, that rather than peace in Europe being secured by the process of intra-European cooperation and mutual understanding, it was US hegemony and the pressure of the Cold War that secured peace, creating the conditions for close cooperation in the Western part of the continent. (Joas, 2020, pp. 66–67) To the extent that Europe never lived in the post-Hobbesian world that some of its architects (and many proponents) liked to imagine, the foundational myth of the EU as a peace project was always problematic. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it untenable. Despite all of this, many scholarly assessments of EU policy towards Russia and Ukraine in the aftermath of Euromaidan and Crimea's seizure were relatively positive. Summarizing the findings of a special issue on the EU's power in the Russia–Ukraine crisis, Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski and Mai'a K. Davis Cross (2017, p. 138) suggest that the EU ‘actually did quite well … as it was not paralyzed by the crisis and reacted swiftly at the supranational, national and transnational levels’. Such assessments are in keeping with the ‘foundational myth’ that animates EU policy-makers and scholars alike, namely, Jean Monnet's famous assertion that European integration will be forged in crisis (Della Sala, 2023, pp. 361–362). This foundational myth provides Europeans with a justificatory narrative for the polity's creation and continued existence, as well as a normative map for dealing with crises. In its internal dimension, crisis is posited as a ‘motor propelling European integration forward’ (Della Sala, 2023, p. 363). That is, whatever the nature of the crisis, ‘more Europe’ presents itself as the answer. In its external dimension, the foundational myth cultivates a narrative of European exceptionalism. That is, the EU is an actor that does things differently. Having transcended the great power politics that was responsible for so much violence in Europe's past, the EU pursues peace through interdependence. As Vincent Della Sala (2023, p. 368) notes, ‘[i]ncreasing energy dependency after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 would not be the choice of a geopolitical actor but of one that looks to trade and interdependence [as] ways to reduce friction and enhance trust’. For many, Angela Merkel embodied the EU's superior approach to external crises. Timothy Garton Ash (2014), for example, praised the then-German Chancellor as a ‘gradualist, quietly plain-speaking, consensus-building, strongest on economic power, patiently steering a slow-moving, sovereignty-sharing, multinational European tortoise’. Putin, by contrast, represented ‘the Russian man: macho, militarist, practitioner of the Soviet-style big lie’. Theirs was a contest of 19th century methods against 21st century ones, and it was a contest Garton Ash suggested, in late 2014, ‘that the tortoise may be winning after all’. This assessment appears misguided today. So too does its underpinning narrative. It is in this light that we must reevaluate the EU's foreign policy capabilities, expectations and the rhetoric that surrounds both. Thus, not only does the capability–expectations gap remain, it has arguably grown. We may point to two broad reasons for the expanding gap between what is expected of the EU in the foreign policy space and what it is capable of achieving. The first is heightened expectations. The second is lowered capabilities. Since the post-Maastricht inauguration of the EU, heightened expectations have been generated, in no small part, by the EU itself. Just 3 days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for example, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, boldly announced the delivery of ‘fighting jets’ (sic) to Ukraine, stressing that ‘we're not talking just about ammunition. We are providing more important arms to go to war’. And though the EU did create an innovative financing mechanism for the purchase of weapons and munitions, it was only the member states that were able to deliver them. Embarrassingly, Borrell was forced to disown his promise shortly after (Tambur, 2022). Of course, the willingness of individual member states to provide Ukraine with weapons, particularly in the early stages of the war, varied greatly. Germany was criticized for its perceived obstructionism, as the rhetoric of radical change in German foreign policy announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz – die Zeitenwende – was not matched by action. The Chancellor's cautious approach was derided as ‘scholzing’, that is, ‘communicating good intentions, only to use/find/invent any reason imaginable to delay these and/or prevent them from happening’ (Garton Ash, 2023). The danger that the EU faces when making unrealistic promises – whether fighter jets or Ukrainian accession in the short–medium term – is that it itself would be guilty of ‘scholzing’. In 2022 and 2023, there appeared to be a veritable competition amongst EU leaders as to who is more pro-Ukrainian than whom. On the eve of Ukraine becoming a candidate state, Ursula von der Leyen (2022) praised Ukrainians for their readiness to ‘die for the European perspective’. Charles Michel (2023), visiting Kyiv on 19 January 2023, proclaimed that ‘we are all Ukrainian’ and that ‘Ukraine is the EU and the EU is Ukraine’. He added, ‘we must spare no effort to turn this promise into reality as fast as we can’. Again, this rhetoric remains unmatched by action. Whilst heightened expectations have been primarily internally stoked, lowered capabilities are mainly the product of changes in the international order and the external constraints they impose upon the EU. The fracturing of the post-Cold War liberal international order has ‘moved the goalposts for EU actorness’, making it harder for the EU to achieve actorness, despite the significant development of its foreign policy capacities since the early 1990s (Costa and Barbé, 2023, p. 432). These external constraints are recognized by key EU actors. Addressing the EU Ambassadors Conference in 2022, High Representative Borrell (whose other role is Commission vice president for ‘A Stronger Europe in the World’) stressed that Europeans live in ‘a world of radical uncertainty’, in which the unexpected and unpredictable occur with increasing frequency (Borrell, 2022a). Similarly, addressing students at the European Diplomatic Academy, Borrell praised the seat of the academy, Bruges, as ‘a European garden’, which exemplifies the EU's main achievements of ‘the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build’. The problem, argued Borrell, is that ‘most of the rest of the world is a jungle’ (Borrell, 2022b). The inappropriate metaphor, redolent of an uglier side of European exceptionalism that elides the history of European imperialism whilst celebrating its results, rightly drew condemnation. Yet, the challenges Borrell sought to describe are very real. We do not need to side with Stephen Kotkin's claim that ‘the cold war never ended’ to accept his insight that ‘fever dreams of a limitless liberal order obscured the stubborn persistence of geopolitics’ (Kotkin, 2022, p. 68). Coming to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Oriol Costa and Esther Barbé (2023, p. 432) note three ways in which it is contributing to the fracturing of the liberal international order in ways that undermine EU actorness. First, it exemplifies the return of armed disputes over spheres of influence (adding to previous Russian uses of force in Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014). Second, it has undermined a key precept of liberal foreign policy, namely, the ‘Wandel durch Handel’ approach to engagement with potential competitors, to which the EU was particularly committed. Third, it has undermined the norm against territorial conquest, which has been one of the cornerstones of post-1945 international law. To these, we may add a fourth ‘dynamic of fragmentation’, namely, the weakening of the multilateral institutions in which the EU is most impactful. All these factors highlight the importance of hard power capacity to foreign policy actorness. To put it provocatively, the world in which the EU could have been a major foreign policy actor no longer exists. After so many bloody conflicts, the Europeans have declared their ‘right to peace’. That gives us a very special role to play: by making a success of integration we are demonstrating to the world that it is possible to create a method of peace. Within the Union the influence of individual States is not the only criterion, alliances have no role to play. In a word, power politics have lost their influence. (Prodi cited in Della Sala, 2023, p. 366) If only Europeans could make peace by declaring their right to it. Instead, there are very real constraints on what a subset of states can ‘make’ in an international system shared by hostile actors willing to use armed force in contravention of the norms of that system. Prodi's account ignores the fact that Europe could only enjoy a world in which ‘power politics have lost their influence’, because it largely outsourced its security needs to the United States and NATO. In fact, the idea of alliances having ‘no role to play’ was not as widely accepted as Prodi would have us believe. Just 2 years prior to his speech, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe secured membership in NATO – a policy goal advocated by erstwhile architects of the 1989 non-violent revolutions, such as Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia. EU foreign policy, including enlargement policy, was predicated on the existence of a world of interdependence, in which conflicts could ultimately be defused through trade and the application of international law. That world had been threatened by Putin's Russia for a long time. After 24 February 2022, there is no certainty to what extent it could be restored. Contra Hill, it is precisely ‘armed might’, rather than questions revolving only around economics and diplomacy, that will shape Europe's future. As armed might will remain largely the prerogative of the EU's member states, individually and acting through NATO, it would make sense for the EU to focus its attention on areas where it can act geopolitically, such as enlargement. ‘Ever since the end of the Cold War, the EU has faced the essential dilemma of where its final borders should be set’ (Smith, 2005, p. 757). Thusly, Karen Smith described the EU's post-Cold War ‘exclusion/inclusion dilemma’, noting that, up to that point, the EU had chosen inclusion. Nearly 20 years after the ‘big bang’ enlargement took place, the dilemma remains the same and so does the choice for inclusion, at least in the sense that eventual membership has not been definitely foreclosed for any aspirants. Whilst we believe that the EU should continue to choose inclusion, what is more important is that it makes a clear choice. Vague rhetoric about countries' long-term European futures is not merely not helpful, but actively unhelpful, in many ways. Ukraine is a case in point. Following the Euromaidan revolution and the Russian annexation of Crimea – events that were triggered by contestation over the future EU–Ukraine relationship – the Union's support for Ukraine stopped short of the promise of membership. Instead, the EU offered ‘a kind of “membership lite” without any prospect of real membership, which was similar to the EU's approach to the countries in Northern Africa’ (Karolewski and Cross, 2017, p. 143). Thus, the EU's engagement with Ukraine, both before and after the events of 2013–2014, left the country in an untenable limbo, as ‘integration without membership’ was enough to antagonize Russia, but not enough either to protect Ukraine from external aggression or to significantly influence its domestic reform (Kuzio, 2017, pp. 104, 116). Prompted by the February 2022 invasion, the EU has now extended the promise of membership to Ukraine. However, a promise without a clear plan for fulfilment is not enough either to secure the EU's geopolitical interests or to facilitate the domestic transformation needed for accession. In this respect, we may look to the countries of the Western Balkans, where despite the confirmation of their membership perspective at the Thessaloniki summit in 2003, progress towards accession has been uneven and protracted (Kartsonaki and Wolff, 2023). Thus, whilst Russia's invasion of Ukraine revived the dormant debate over enlargement, the EU and its member states remain divided over the core questions of what, when, how and how many? They are also divided on the question of whether and how the EU should be reformed in anticipation of a (potentially significantly) enlarged membership. This is the EU's most confounding present task: how to integrate Ukraine and other candidates in a timely manner, whilst maintaining the coherence of the European project and the credibility of its underlying values. Debates over enlargement are entwined with larger questions about how war on the EU's doorstep is shaping, and is likely to shape, its polity-building project. The question that Stanley Hoffmann (2000, p. 189) raised in the aftermath of the Kosovo crisis of 1998–1999 seems as pressing as ever: will the current crisis ‘finally produce what many have been advocating over the years: a Europe that would be a complete, not merely a civilian power’? In other words, can the EU ‘acquire the federal foreign policy’ that ‘would give the external quality of a state (and ipso facto superpower status)’? This would necessitate major adjustments to the EU's procedures, including ‘the concession of majority voting’ and ‘the acceptance that defense should no longer be a no-go area’ (Hill, 1993, p. 316). Hill was sceptical whether this could be achieved short of ‘some great trauma, internal or external’, which would fuse the member states ‘into a single entity’ (Hill, 1993, p. 325). We argue that any transition to a state-like foreign policy remains unrealistic, a major war on the EU's eastern border notwithstanding. To be sure, key European leaders, such as Macron and Scholz, have articulated ambitious reform proposals aimed alternatively at carving out a European foreign policy distinct from the US/NATO and strengthening the supranational character of the EU's foreign policy. Yet, calls by Macron for ‘European Strategic Autonomy’ lose credibility when they are juxtaposed with statements suggesting France's reluctance to extend its nuclear deterrent across the continent (Caulcutt, 2022). Similarly, Scholz's calls for the abolition of unanimity requirements in foreign policy matters are unlikely to elicit unanimous support, particularly considering the strong opposition amongst Central and Eastern European member states. In our view, then, neither Scholz's more ‘federal Europe’ nor Macron's ‘sovereign Europe’ appear to be viable options to solve the security challenges facing the EU. In fact, the evidence so far suggests that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not precipitating a federalization of core state powers (coercive, fiscal, administrative) in the EU. Instead, the war has given impetus to capacity-building at the national level, especially in the defence and security realms (Genschel et al., 2023). To be sure, the EU has an important role to play in building capacity, but as a buttress, rather than a replacement, of state capacity. Thus, the scenario that appears more realistic for the EU's future is one that finds few supporters in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, though it is in line with the preferences of Central and Eastern European states, such as Poland, namely, a Europe of sovereign states. Such a construct would also be better placed to eventually integrate Ukraine, which is fighting for its own sovereignty, and not for a sovereign, let alone post-sovereign Europe. The EU is bounded in its capacities. It is also bounded in its potential for further enlargement. In both senses, the existence of boundaries needs to be clearly acknowledged. The immediate challenge for Ukraine and its European allies is, of course, to win the war. But even if this is achieved, Ukraine and the EU will still need to win the peace via integration. If Ukraine is not brought into the EU, it will continue to exist ‘in-between’, that is, in the shadow of a revanchist Russia. Yet, it is clear that bringing Ukraine into the EU will not be a straightforward task. The question of its accession raises several dilemmas that go to the heart of EU identity and actorness. Chief amongst these are the extent to which the EU must wield hard power in order to be a credible foreign policy actor and, relatedly, the relationship between the EU and NATO (as well as between EU enlargement and NATO enlargement). As noted above, the EU's economic/political project and NATO's security project advanced alongside one another throughout the second half of the 20th century, the latter creating the conditions that enabled the former to conceptualize itself as a peace project. Nevertheless, by continuing to rely on NATO to guarantee European security well after the end of the Cold War, the EU failed to live up to Hill's first task – namely, counterbalancing US power globally. Indeed, to date, the EU has not even achieved the more modest goal of strategic autonomy on issues related directly to Europe. In some ways, all the EU's weaknesses as a foreign policy actor – including its ineffectiveness as a ‘regional pacifier’ and ‘mediator of conflict’ – flow from this failure. To a hostile actor such as Putin's Russia, Europe's lack of distance from the United States rendered EU enlargement as threatening as NATO enlargement. The failure of European leaders to recognize Putin's threat perception, much less prepare an adequate response, put Ukraine in a vulnerable position. The path out of this predicament remains unclear, the bold rhetoric of key EU actors notwithstanding. In this way, the capability-expectations gap, which Hill identified as the EU's major potential challenge, remains a source of instability for Ukraine and Europe at large. The indeterminate status of the EU polity has unwittingly contributed to the indeterminate status of Ukraine. Another set of dilemmas concerns the trade-offs of realizing enlargement (particularly within a relatively short time frame) versus the trade-offs of not realizing enlargement. At stake is the EU's credibility as a foreign policy actor and its ability to adjust to a changing geopolitical constellation. If the EU appears to lose interest in the region, then other powers, such as Russia, China and Turkey, will seek to take its place. At stake too, though, is internal coherence. An unreformed EU would risk overextending itself, which is precisely why the reform debate has accompanied the enlargement debate. But here, too, a lack of unity obscures the way forward. Which reforms? In which sequence? To be accomplished before, or alongside enlargement? And to what end? In this article, we have only begun to address the question of what kind of EU would be able to meet these challenges. Using Hill's concept of the ‘capability–expectations gap’, we caution against repeating mistakes that contributed to the conflict in the EU's eastern neighbourhood. These mistakes include misjudgements over what kind of power the EU has, how that power can be used and how it is likely to be perceived by others. Ukraine and the EU will not be made one at once. Adjustments will need to be made in both polities. But the focus on the details of accession, important as they are, should not distract from the big picture – that enlargement is a geopolitical tool that the Union should wield decisively.