In recent weeks, Brussels has set the enlargement machine in motion again.

Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos pointed to Montenegro as the most advanced candidate, speaking of a closed Accession Treaty by the end of 2026 and possible entry in 2028.
At the same time she announced that this will be the first treaty of a ‘new generation’, with ‘safeguard clauses’ built into the text and no ‘Trojan horses’ among the future member states.

These formulas are a symptom of the European dilemma.
Innovative safeguard clauses are mechanisms that will allow the Union to intervene automatically if, after accession, a new member backs down on the rule of law or stops applying the common rules – for instance by suspending certain benefits of the single market or tightening controls in sensitive areas.

The ‘Trojan horse’ is the nightmare of a new Hungary or Poland case: a country that enters respecting the criteria, but once inside uses its right of veto and its presence in the institutions to block everything and weaken the European project from within.

To understand why this package of promises sounds both new and old, one must remember how the classical membership model works.

For more than twenty years, the Western Balkans have been living within an ever-changing ritual: an endless maturity test made up of thirty-five negotiating chapters to open and close, dozens of technical ‘benchmarks’ to tick off, annual checks by the Commission – often perceived as a distant judge – and, in the end, a yes or no that requires unanimity among the Twenty-Seven.

On paper, it is a straightforward path: you implement theAcquis, reform the institutions, join the club.
In practice it has turned into an endless corridor, where a single national veto can paralyse everything for decades.

It is here that the Monnet Method, designed for a slow and predictable Europe of peace, shows all its limitations and obsolescence.

The basic idea was that integration should start from the centre – markets, rules, bureaucracies – and radiate, in small steps, towards the periphery.
Today, history is running in reverse: while Ukraine fights an existential war and Montenegro already aligns its security and defence policies with NATO standards, even before closing the agricultural chapters, it is the periphery that is behaving like a full Europe while the centre remains entangled in procedures.

The result is a paradox: we have countries that in practice already contribute to the continent’s security and stability, but remain legally confined to the waiting room.
The accession model designed to ‘teach’ Europe to the Balkans has turned into a way to postpone indefinitely the political choices that touch the heart of the Union – treaty reform, overcoming unanimity, redistribution of veto power.

There is an unspeakable truth hovering in the corridors of the Berlaymont: the current stability of the Union does not rest on integration, but on strategic and calculated exclusion.
It is an institutional laziness that rests on the idea that the Balkans must remain outside the European institutions to avoid having to really reform the rules of the game.

Weak Europe insists on wanting the Balkans as a buffer zone to offload crises – from Giorgia Meloni’s migration policies, with the Italian repatriation centres in Shengjin and Gjader, to the management of the Azerbaijani gas vertical corridor and NATO intelligence sharing against Russian threats in the Adriatic – without granting them a seat that would alter the political weights in the European Parliament or Council.

Keeping the Western Balkans in a permanent buffer zone is the daily opium of Brussels.

This limbo makes it possible to circumvent the Gordian knot of the right of veto, treaty reform and theacquis comm unautaire: over a hundred thousand pages of benchmarks to be ticked off one by one, procedures still requiring unanimity, chapters frozen over a Hungarian or Slovenian objection.
It is no longer an accession process, but a mental bunker erected to defend a scleroticised status quo.

It is precisely the word bunker that gives us the most revealing parallel. Hoxha’s Albania was littered with them, but today that country embodies a concrete rebirth: religious coexistence between Muslims, Christians and Bektashi without tensions, administrative digitalisation with e-Albania providing services in just a few clicks, acceleration on the Green Agenda chapters with wind farms powering the whole of Durres.

Kosovo, for its part, integrated its customs and information systems with those of Albania and North Macedonia, reducing customs clearance times by 70 per cent.

And when Tirana, Pristina and Zagreb sign common defence agreements against hybrid threats, from Russian drones to Serbian propaganda, they are weaving a functional integration that bypasses Brussels.

It is an inverted process: the periphery is federating the centre, practising Europe in deeds before treaties.
Brussels can only choose: lead this movement by recognising it and channelling it into an accelerated enlargement, or ratify it late, when the key decisions have already been taken elsewhere.

This dynamic finds historical parallels that should give European decision-makers pause for thought.
Between the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D., while the Senate in Rome was paralysed by procedures and privileges that had no grip on reality, it was the limes – the militarised frontier that ran along the Rhine and the Danube – that saved the very idea of Roman civilisation. It was the provinces, often led by marginal but pragmatic elites, that federated the empire when the centre was no longer able to guarantee its cohesion.

Today, the Western Balkans are the new limes: they are becoming European by instinct and pragmatism, while the centre suffers from a moral fatigue that mistakes procedure for strategy.
Every year of waiting does not prepare the Balkans, but drives them apart, leaving the schools of democracy to be replaced by the academies of resentment and autocracy.

To recognise the Tirana-Pristina-Zagreb axis or the Kyiv resistance as the beating heart of the new Europe means to stop looking at the Balkans as a periphery to be educated. It means realising that structural integration is already underway and that the centre must choose whether to lead it or merely ratify it belatedly.

Luigi Einaudi would remind us that freedom is not granted ‘when one is ready’, but is won through institutions.
The Europe of the 21st century will not be the result of a bureaucratic consensus reached in an anonymous hall in Brussels, but the formalisation of a solidarity born of necessity on the borders.

Keeping the Balkans out does not protect Europe; it is condemning it to slow sclerosis. Integrating them means injecting new sap into an organism that has forgotten what it means to fight for its values.