Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has requested that the country be allowed to join the European Union as a result of Russia’s invasion. Marie-Eve Bélanger draws on recent research to assess whether there is sufficient political support across Europe for Ukraine to be given a viable path to EU membership.

Does the rise of the populist radical right threaten the European integration process? Focusing on EU enlargement, Marie-Eve Bélanger and Natasha Wunsch show that populist radical right actors have been able to build an increasingly coherent discursive coalition opposing further widening of the European Union that is putting mainstream party families under pressure to respond.

There is little question the EU’s enlargement process has stalled since the ‘big bang’ enlargement of 2004, but how has the discourse surrounding enlargement changed in European parliaments during this period? Drawing on a new study, Marie-Eve Bélanger and Frank Schimmelfennig find that enlargement discourse in European parliaments was significantly more restrictive during the 2010s, with the enlargement process losing salience and becoming increasingly culturally contested.

Enlargement is the most significant debordering policy of the European Union. In an analysis of debates in the European Parliament and a sample of member state national parliaments, this article examines whether EU enlargement discourse has been characterized by a politicized rebordering process since the mid-2000s. We find that enlargement discourse has become more ‘rebordered’ in the course of the 2010s.