A few days after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s proposal for “associate member status” for Ukraine and “observer” status for the Western Balkans (see EUROPE 13872/3), Germany and France called, in a document dated Thursday 4 June, for facilitating the gradual integration of the candidate countries on the road to EU membership.
“We must provide additional incentives as part of a merit-based, gradual integration process and streamline the current process to make it more efficient and to allow for faster and deeper integration into the EU on the basis of the Copenhagen criteria”, say Paris and Berlin.
They therefore advocate for a “new, process-oriented approach which cuts overformalised hurdles for intermediate steps and simplifies the current methodology”. They would like to see “more structured gradual integration, thus providing additional incentives for reforms”.
In its document, published ahead of the EU-Western Balkans Summit on 5 June and the EU-Moldova Summit on 22 June, France and Germany call on the Commission to put forward proposals to facilitate the gradual integration of the candidate countries into the EU.
France and Germany are in favour of sectoral integration into the single market in certain areas, provided that the candidate countries comply with their respective standards and requirements and/or have provisionally closed the relevant negotiation chapters. These countries could also participate fully in the single market on the basis of a ‘European Economic Area+’ model if they have adopted and implemented the acquis relating to groups of chapters 1 to 5 and provisionally closed the relevant negotiating chapters, without prejudice to transitional periods and safeguards.
Germany and France also highlight the need to strengthen cooperation on security and defence and to participate in EU programmes and initiatives.
In addition, the Western Balkans and Moldova should be able to participate in the ‘Foreign Affairs’ Council on specific agenda items as observers and without voting rights, if they have provisionally closed the accession negotiation chapter on foreign, security and defence policy (Chapter 31).
France and Germany also propose joint meetings between the European Commission and MEPs with representatives of the countries of the Western Balkans and Moldova, twice a year. The two countries believe that meetings of joint parliamentary committees made up of MEPs and national MPs from the candidate countries should be held more frequently.
See the document: https://aeur.eu/f/m6h (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)