Research: Ukraine is waiting because the EU cannot decide, not because it is too small

The usual story about Ukraine’s accession is about size: a large, poor, wartime country that would strain the budget, the CAP and the Council table. Hubert Gabrisch’s paper for the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies turns that story around.

The Union’s apparent economic and political weakness, he argues, does not come from territory or population. It comes from an institutional architecture that can no longer answer geopolitical challenges. An institutionally weak EU therefore hesitates to take Ukraine in as a full member.

That is the hinge of *Association, Membership and the EU’s Capability to Act Geopolitically*, published this month. Since 2022 Brussels has paid, armed and sanctioned on a scale it once called impossible. It has still been a spectator in the diplomacy that will settle Ukraine’s borders and security. The blockage is not a lack of money or will in the abstract. It is unanimity and the veto in foreign and security policy. Add members under those rules and the Union does not become more geopolitical. It becomes easier to stop.

Ukraine exposes the problem rather than causing it. Candidate status after the invasion was a political signal. The 2017 association agreement already ties Kyiv to large parts of the single-market acquis. What it does not confer is a vote, a commissioner with a portfolio, or a claim on the common agricultural policy. Those belong to membership. Several capitals, Berlin among them in the “associate membership” debate, have tried to invent a third status that looks like the second and is written like the first. Gabrisch’s answer is blunt: association is not membership, in any form. Blend the two and you get legal uncertainty, a second-class waiting room Kyiv would be right to distrust, and a precedent other candidates would seize.

The hesitation is institutional

If the Union were merely “too big” or “too diverse,” the cure would be to keep Ukraine out until it is smaller in its demands. Gabrisch’s diagnosis runs the other way. The EU already has the economic weight of a geoeconomic power. What it lacks is the capacity to use that weight on purpose. Vetoes turn every strategic file into a hostage. Rule-of-law disputes with existing members show that conditionality is weaker after accession than before it. External powers – Russia, China, the United States – can work those seams. In that setting, full membership for Ukraine is not rejected because Ukraine is unworthy. It is postponed because the club doubts its own ability to absorb a strategic decision and still act.

Hence the caution in Berlin and elsewhere: better a hybrid status than a twenty-eighth veto. The paper treats that caution as a symptom. A half-membership dressed as association would still need to survive the treaties. Association under Article 217 TFEU is a foreign-policy instrument. Membership is a constitutional change. Fuse them and a court could tear the construct up. Politically, the same construct tells Moscow and any blocking capital that the Union has already given what it can give.

A thicker association while the house is repaired

Gabrisch’s alternative is unsentimental. Upgrade Ukraine’s association toward the European Economic Area: deep single-market access, consultation on draft law, common rules – and no vote on internal policy, no CAP bill, no CFSP veto. Norway and Iceland live there. Austria used the EEA as a short antechamber before joining. The point is not to park Ukraine forever. It is to lock the orientation in while the EU expands qualified majority in foreign policy, clarifies the Parliament’s role, and makes rule-of-law enforcement bite on members as well as candidates.

Conditionality remains. The Copenhagen tests – market, competitiveness, absorption – do not lapse because the war made Ukraine morally unanswerable. What changes is the sequence: thicken the association, reform the treaties, then enlarge. Widening first does not project power. It imports the next veto.

For Kyiv the implication is harsh and clear. Keep the chapters open. Refuse a status neither council nor court can defend. Take EEA-grade access and reconstruction money that does not pretend to be the CAP. And read every month of European hesitation for what Gabrisch says it is: not a judgement on Ukraine’s size, but on the Union’s machinery. An institutionally weak EU does not welcome a full member. It looks for a formula that postpones the moment when it would have to decide.

Caption: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (R) and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (L) attend a meeting in Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 July 2026. Ursula von der Leyen arrived in Kyiv to meet with senior Ukrainian officials amid the ongoing Russian invasion. EPA/SERGEY DOLZHENKO