The neighbourhood matters for the EU. It has held active policies towards its neighbours for over two decades: the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was launched in 2004, and the Eastern Partnership (EaP) in 2009. As part of these policies, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova have established Association Agreements and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) with the EU, facilitating trade further by gradual approximation of local legislation, rules and procedures, including standards, to those of the EU. Although membership was not on the table, in the wake of the Russia attack against Ukraine, when Ukraine and Moldova applied for EU membership in 2022, candidate status was granted. In November 2023, the Commission adopted the 2023 Enlargement Package and recommended the Council to open negotiations with the two countries. This paper aims to assess the impacts of the war in Ukraine on EU foreign policy towards its Eastern neighbours. We do so by the lenses of debates on Europeanization. According to Gawrich et al.(2009) there are three dimensions of Europeanization research: i) Membership Europeanization, which refers to the impact of the EU on its member States (current members); ii) Enlargement Europeanization, related to countries in the accession process and candidate countries (perspective members); and iii) Neighbourhood Europeanization, for those without membership perspective (“EU’s neighbouring ‘outsiders’”). Our aim is to assess the Ukraine and Moldova’s relationship with the EU as both countries start the accession negotiations.

The war in Ukraine had a mixed impact on the entire geopolitical order and the complex international system, affecting the relationship between Moscow and the Western Balkan countries and the Western Balkans' approach to the EU's policies. Since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Western Balkans have been repeatedly asked to act diplomatically and economically against Russia, whether by implementing sanctions or not. Nonetheless, the sanctions taken against the Kremlin were not performed equally by all Western Balkan countries, then and now. In light of this, the war in Ukraine has brought a division into two groups in the region: pro-Western and pro-Russian. Thus, the pro-western countries have imposed tough sanctions on Russia. In response to this policy, the Kremlin added them to its list of 'enemy' states after they joined EU sanctions against Russia. However, the conflict has also created new challenges for EU integration. The Bursels relationship with the Kremlin has become more strained, making it more difficult for the EU to engage with Russia on issues of mutual concern. Regarding their current relationship, it has impacted the integration process of the Western Balkan countries, and EU integration is a particularly important issue in the region. The paper aims to analyse the current position of the Western Balkans and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a strong catalyst that is directly affecting the relationship of the Western Balkan countries with the EU and Russia.

Since 2018 the EU has been adopting a more geopolitical approach toward its enlargement based on the promotion of security and stability in its immediate neighborhood. Changing European and global geopolitical landscapes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further propelled the geopolitical and ‘stabilitocracy’ logics of the EU’s enlargement policy, culminating in the confirmation of the candidate status of Ukraine and Moldova. Notwithstanding the growing ‘geopoliticization’ of EU enlargement politics, Turkey remains generally excluded from the discussions on the prospective enlargement waves and does not feature amply in the official statements and documents on enlargement by EU officials and Member States’ representatives. At the same time, the EU recognizes Turkey’s geopolitical importance and its function as a ‘key partner’ for the Union (European Commission 2022), highlighting the ‘need […] to re-engage with Turkey’ (Council of the European Union 2023) in the emerging European security order. The return of geopolitics in EU enlargement, on the one hand, and Turkey’s discernable exclusion from accession scenarios, on the other, engender an important theoretical and analytical puzzle to be solved. The current situation also juxtaposes the post-Kosovo war period, which marked a watershed moment for European security architecture and triggered the 1999 European Council decision to grant Turkey candidate status despite persevering problems regarding Turkey’s adherence to the EU’s democratic and economic criteria (Turhan 2012). To decipher this conundrum, this paper will take a relational approach and draw on the concept of ‘geopolitical Othering’, which concerns the construction of ‘Europe’ based on the EU’s perceptions and representations of various key players’ roles in the international system and its discursive boundary-drawing practices presenting the Other as a threat to the European security and its liberal democratic order (Diez 2004, 2005; Slootmaeckers 2019). Empirically, the analysis will specifically focus on following three cases: the 2016 EU-Turkey Statement on migration (also known as the refugee ‘deal), the ongoing power struggles between Turkey, Greece and Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Turkey’s official policies vis-à-vis Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Utilizing discourse analysis, it will show how the rise of a geopoliticized identity discourse in the EU over the last decade due to key internal and external developments coupled with Turkey’s intensifying geopolitical activism in the EU’s immediate neighborhood and its reciprocal geo-political Othering of the EU played an important role in Turkey’s exclusion from latest accession scenarios amidst a geopolitical turn in EU enlargement politics.