Hello from Brussels, where the days are getting longer and spring is finally looming over the European capital.<\/p>\n
Along with it, a slight breeze of hope has been drifting through town for the EU\u2019s \u201cwaiting room\u201d countries \u2013 aspirants that have fallen behind in the membership race but would like to make a sudden leap and land inside the 27-nation bloc. Over the past weeks, informal ideas have begun to circulate in the Brussels corridors about how to make accession feel easier and more tangible, especially for those stuck in limbo.<\/p>\n
One notion has caught the ears of diplomats and officials \u2013 \u201creversed membership\u201d. The concept is to pull candidate countries much closer to EU structures, let them behave like members in many areas and give them access to concrete benefits \u2013 without making them fully fledged members of the club.<\/p>\n
Crucially, these countries would not have the right to vote, and would not, therefore, wield veto power. These conversations did not appear out of thin air. They have largely been nudged into life as part of Russia-Ukraine peace talks, with the United States mediating and trying to bundle in broader political guarantees. Ironically, while Ukraine\u2019s membership of the EU is part of those talks, the EU itself is neither directly involved nor informed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello from Brussels, where the days are getting longer and spring is finally looming over the European capital.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[104],"tags":[6213,21964,211,210,6549,7360,21870,73,3039,5197,19378,7362,7363,241,1888,10314],"class_list":["post-38470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brussels","tag-albania","tag-aleksandar-vucic","tag-belgium","tag-brussels","tag-edi-rama","tag-eu-accession","tag-eu-enlargement","tag-european-union","tag-hungary","tag-kosovo","tag-marta-kos","tag-montenegro","tag-serbia","tag-ukraine","tag-ursula-von-der-leyen","tag-volodymyr-zelensky"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116215606698153913","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}