Summary
EU accession Candidate Countries of the Western Balkans and Eastern Neighbourhood face to varying degrees, military-based or other hard security threats from third states such as Russia and China. These threats range from destabilising defence cooperation arrangements, through hybrid warfare with military elements, to military coercion and large-scale armed aggression. The Candidate Countries, however, also to varying degrees, lack resilience against these threats.
The EU has tools and instruments to assist resilience-building against hard security threats. So far however, it has used these in only limited ways, for example in its support to Ukraine and in its peace support presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This undermines EU recognition that investing in the security of countries immediately beyond its borders is also an investment in its own peace and security.
To address this, the EU urgently needs to adopt a robust and multi-front approach which uses all the tools and instruments at its disposal to enhance the resilience of the Candidate Countries against hard security threats. It must:
- place greater emphasis on security and defence in the enlargement process and on concluding and operationalising security and defence partnerships with the Candidate Countries;
- implement a broad range of measures to integrate the candidate countries into its own security and defence processes; and
- establish a stronger security presence in the two regions through direct interventions with Common Security and Defence Policy and other security-related instruments.
