Inaugural Europa Lecture 2026: Frank Schimmelfennig on EU Enlargement in a Geopolitical Era
On November 6, 2026 the Centre for European Research at the University of Gothenburg (CERGU) is pleased to welcome professor Frank Schimmelfennig (ETH Zürich) as the speaker for the first Europa Lecture.
After a long period of stagnation, the EU enlargement process has been revitalized in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Despite the widely accepted geopolitical imperative of admitting neighboring countries as EU members, enlargement faces significant trade-offs and hurdles. For one, whereas geopolitical pressures have increased, the quality of democracy and the rule of law in candidate countries has not. To reconcile this “merit gap” with expectations of progress toward accession, the EU has upgraded the institutional status of candidate countries and created intermediate pre-accession benefits, while being reluctant to actually admit them as new members. Most accession hopefuls have been stuck in various “waiting rooms” for a long time. The lecture examines the trade-offs in the EU’s current enlargement policy and discusses various policy proposals for overcoming them.
