When President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared this week that Ukraine could be ready for European Union accession by 2027 if given a concrete timeline, he did more than accelerate a diplomatic conversation. He exposed a tension at the heart of enlargement.
Will accession make life better, or simply more expensive?
Ukraine presses forward with wartime urgency. The European Union hesitates with peacetime caution. Meanwhile, in the Western Balkans, enthusiasm for membership coexists with a quieter scepticism: will accession make life better, or simply more expensive?
The question is no longer whether enlargement worked in the past. It is whether it can still persuade citizens—not governments—that it works for them.
The evidence: enlargement has delivered before
The empirical case remains powerful—and specific.
When Poland entered the European Union in 2004, her GDP per capita stood at roughly half the EU average. Two decades later, it has reached 80%. Poland’s nominal GDP grew from $199 billion in 2003 to over $1 trillion in 2025—the only EU member state to avoid recession during the 2008 financial crisis.
Between 2004 and 2023, the country received €246 billion from the EU, with a net balance of €162 billion after membership fees. That money built motorways, modernised energy infrastructure, and helped attract $279 billion in foreign direct investment. Poland’s economy is now the sixth largest in the European Union.
Enlargement succeeded because it fused conditionality with opportunity.
The Baltic states moved from post-Soviet fragility to global relevance within a generation. Estonia, whose GDP per capita stood at $2,800 in 1992—one-eighth of neighbouring Finland’s—built a digital governance infrastructure that gave rise to Skype, Bolt, and Wise. Today, her GDP per capita exceeds $30,000.
The country that couldn’t afford to build a conventional bureaucracy leapfrogged into one that barely needs paper at all. Slovenia integrated smoothly into European industrial and financial networks, becoming one of the wealthiest post-socialist states in Europe.
These transformations were not automatic. They followed judicial reform, regulatory harmonisation, and fiscal discipline—the often tedious mechanics of accession. Enlargement succeeded because it fused conditionality with opportunity.
If Ukraine were integrated under comparable terms, the economic scale would be greater still.
Hungary, vetoes and democratic strain
Yet optimism without confrontation is merely rhetoric.
Hungary under Viktor Orbán has repeatedly tested the Union’s institutional patience. Budget conditionality disputes, rule-of-law conflicts, and veto politics have fuelled the perception that enlargement dilutes cohesion. Polish and French farmers blocking Ukrainian grain imports demonstrate how single-market integration generates distributive tension. A Union of more than thirty member states risks procedural paralysis.
These criticisms are not peripheral. They are central.
The lesson, however, is not that enlargement fails. It is that enlargement without institutional adaptation is fragile. Conditionality tied to funding, strengthened rule-of-law enforcement, and expanded qualified majority voting are no longer theoretical reforms; they are preconditions for sustainable expansion.
Economic integration does not automatically translate into emotional integration.
The European Commission has already frozen billions in cohesion funds to Hungary over rule-of-law breaches—a mechanism that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Enlargement forced the Union to build that tool. The next round will force her to build more.
Hungary’s case also reveals something subtler. Economic integration does not automatically translate into emotional integration. Resentment can grow even amidst rising GDP. That matters profoundly when considering the Balkans.
Balkan scepticism: prices rise faster than wages
The Balkan Barometer 2025 recorded the highest regional support for EU membership in a decade—64% on average, up ten points from the previous year. Albania leads at 86%. But Serbia sits at 42%, and a third of Serbians polled believe their country will never join.
The gap reflects economics as much as geopolitics. Average net wages across the Western Balkans range from €740 in North Macedonia to €932 in Serbia, against €1,444 in neighbouring Croatia, which joined the Union in 2013. The minimum consumer basket in Serbia allots a three-member family 200 grams of luncheon sausage per month.
As one economist put it: you could have a guest over once, but if they came twice, you would have nothing to serve them. EU alignment brings regulatory tightening, market opening, and price convergence—but wages do not follow at the same pace.
If milk and electricity approach Western prices while salaries lag behind, enthusiasm becomes conditional.
In Croatia, which adopted the euro on 1 January 2023, integration was accompanied by sharp perceptions of price inflation. Retailers and service providers hiked prices during the changeover period; the government threatened fines.
Studies later suggested that the actual euro-driven inflation was modest—perhaps 0.2 percentage points in a single month—but the political damage was real. The Croatian consumer protection association reported marked increases in coffee and baked goods. Whether statistically exaggerated or not, perception shaped public sentiment.
For households living close to subsistence margins, that sequencing matters. If milk and electricity approach Western prices while salaries lag behind, enthusiasm becomes conditional.
This is not merely economic arithmetic; it is political psychology.
Mobility and the unspoken pillar
The European Union’s free movement of workers is supposed to smooth economic disparities after accession. In Poland and the Baltic states, it did. Workers relocated to higher-wage markets, remittances flowed back, and as domestic wages rose, return migration followed.
In much of the Western Balkans, the pattern is different. Family structures are tighter, linguistic barriers are higher, and when migration does occur, it tends to be permanent rather than cyclical. Croatia’s population has contracted by roughly 10% since accession.
Where mobility is low, price convergence without wage convergence breeds frustration.
North Macedonia’s union representative warned that the country is “being emptied of workers” and will soon be “a territory with no sense in entering the EU because Macedonian workers have already entered the EU—by moving away.”
That generates a paradox. Where mobility is low, price convergence without wage convergence breeds frustration. Where migration is permanent, communities hollow out and resentment attaches to the Union rather than to domestic structural weaknesses. The freedom of movement exists in law, but not always in social readiness.
Ukraine’s different starting point
Ukraine’s situation differs in critical respects—and in ways that should temper both optimism and pessimism with specifics.
Since 2022, over 4.3 million Ukrainians have lived under temporary protection across the European Union, with the largest communities in Germany (1.2 million), Poland (nearly 1 million), and the Czech Republic (close to 400,000).
Ukrainian civil society broadly perceives European integration as synonymous with institutional reform, anti-corruption measures, and security anchoring.
Labour mobility is no longer theoretical; it is a lived experience on an unprecedented scale. Many are already working, paying taxes, and enrolling children in European schools. Whether they stay or return, they carry back institutional familiarity that no accession textbook can replicate.
Ukrainian civil society broadly perceives European integration as synonymous with institutional reform, anti-corruption measures, and security anchoring. That perception is grounded in concrete achievements. On 16 March 2022—three weeks into a full-scale war—Ukraine’s power grid completed emergency synchronisation with the European ENTSO-E network, a process originally scheduled for 2023.
EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson called it “a year’s work in two weeks.” Ukraine’s bilateral screening of all EU negotiation chapters was completed in what EU officials described as an unprecedentedly short timeframe. The country has fulfilled 44 reform steps under its accession plan, including measures on anti-corruption capacity, corporate governance, and energy policy.
Ukrainian agriculture integrated into the single market will provoke competitive anxiety in neighbouring states.
None of this means reform is smooth. In July 2025, the Verkhovna Rada passed a law that effectively placed the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office under political control—a move that sparked street protests, drew sharp criticism from Brussels, and threatened to derail accession progress.
Zelenskyy reversed course within days, signing legislation that restored the agencies’ independence. The episode revealed both the fragility of reform and the strength of the constituency that defends it.
For many Ukrainians, accession is not primarily about consumption prices; it is about legal certainty, security, and belonging. That does not eliminate economic adjustment pain. Ukrainian agriculture integrated into the single market will provoke competitive anxiety in neighbouring states. Domestic industries will face compliance costs. But public expectation in Ukraine appears more aligned with the structural sacrifices enlargement entails.
Scale, reform and credibility
An enlarged Union incorporating Ukraine and the Western Balkans would approach half a billion citizens. In a global economy shaped by American industrial policy and Chinese state capitalism, scale confers resilience. Yet scale without cohesion risks fragmentation.
Therefore, optimism must be disciplined.
If the European Union can sequence accession realistically, provide transitional protections for vulnerable sectors, and communicate honestly about price dynamics and wage convergence, enlargement can still produce stabilisation and growth. If she dismisses Balkan scepticism as ignorance or Hungarian grievance as an anomaly, resentment will deepen.
In Tallinn, the Estonian government opened the Freedom School in August 2022—a bilingual institution teaching 570 Ukrainian refugee children in grades seven through twelve, with 60% of instruction in Estonian and 40% in Ukrainian. Nearly half the teachers are themselves Ukrainian refugees.
A Fulbright scholar who taught English there described asking students to write about their ideal vacation. Almost every student in the classroom wanted to go back to Ukraine—to see family, to see the Carpathian Mountains, to see the Black Sea.
Germany’s chancellor says 2027 is “out of the question.”
That is the human arithmetic of enlargement in miniature: children learning a new country’s language and curriculum while longing for a home that may not exist as they remember it. Whether the Union can hold both realities—the integration and the grief—will determine whether enlargement succeeds on human terms, not merely institutional ones.
Zelenskyy’s 2027 horizon sharpens the moment. Ukraine asks for dates and milestones. Orbán’s political adviser calls it “an immediate and direct threat.” Germany’s chancellor says 2027 is “out of the question.”
The European Commission, characteristically, praises progress while declining to speculate on dates. Meanwhile, Politico reports that Brussels is quietly drafting a plan for partial membership—a halfway house that would anchor Ukraine within the Union’s framework even before all chapters are closed.
Enlargement worked before. It may work again.
The Balkans ask for proof that accession does not merely raise supermarket bills. Hungary reminds Brussels that integration without emotional consent is incomplete.
Enlargement worked before. It may work again. But it will not succeed on institutional logic alone. It must address the human arithmetic of prices and wages, of mobility and rootedness, of pride and perceived loss.
A Serbian family budgets 200 grams of sausage for the month. A classroom of Ukrainian children in Tallinn writes about wanting to see the Carpathians again. A Croatian retiree is certain the euro raised the price of her coffee, whatever Eurostat says. None of them will be persuaded by GDP charts. All of them are watching to see whether the Union that asks for their trust can actually earn it.
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