It is a form of European thought which progresses through enthusiastic analogies. The latest to date, carried in particular by the magazine The Great Continent of June 9, 2026, proposes to see in Ukraine the “Far East” of the Union – a border territory, wild and promising, called to become for Europe what California was for the United States: a laboratory of innovation, a breadbasket, a military rampart and, tomorrow, an engine of the economy of the future. The analogy is attractive. It is also revealing of an intellectual and political impasse that the war in Ukraine did not create, but which it aggravates by giving it new urgency.
Because before designating Ukraine as the horizon of the Union, the Union would still need to know where it begins and where it ends. Before projecting towards the East a neighborhood policy which now extends as far as the Caucasus, the Turkish question, open since September 12, 1963, must be resolved. Before making new promises of enlargement – in the Balkans, in Ukraine, as far as Armenia – the Union must have drawn the consequences institutional aspects of previous enlargements. And before all that, we still need to have a common foreign and security policy (CFSP) worthy of the name, which is no longer the case since the departure of Javier Solana on December 1, 2009.
European aid to Ukraine is legitimate, necessary and urgent. It is not her who is at issue here. What is in question is the political use that is made of it: that of a substitute for deepening, of an additional opportunity to postpone the fundamental questions that the Union has refused to ask about itself for fifteen years. Ukraine deserves better than a promise whose exact value Turkey has learned to measure in half a century.
I. Enlargement as a substitute for deepening
When The Great Continent opens his analysis with the image of westerns – those old films where we “forget that we have before our eyes the place which today is considered to be the advanced point of humanity in terms of wealth and technological innovation” – the rhetoric is clever. It mobilizes a collective memory, it plays on temporal reversal, it suggests that the deprivation of today prefigures the power of tomorrow. But it misses the point: what made California what it is is not the border. It was the federal framework that made it possible – a strong federal state, a single currency, a unified domestic market, massive public investment capacity, mobility of labor and capital without institutional barriers. Silicon Valley was not born out of the desert ; it was born from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Californian public universities financed by federal taxes, and venture capital made possible by the depth of American financial markets.
However, the European Union is not the United States. It has no federal state, no federal budget up to par, no comparable labor mobility, no unified capital market — the Draghi report of September 9, 2024, which cites precisely The Great Continentunderlines this with rare brutality. To project Ukraine as the engine of the European economy of the future in this context is to reverse the causal order: it is not the integration of a new territory which will create the conditions for its own success, it is the prior deepening of the Union which could, in the long term, make it credible. In the absence of real institutional reform, Ukrainian reconstruction risks reproducing the trajectory of the cohesion funds: considerable financial transfers, uneven results, and a convenient substitution for the political question that we do not want to ask.
The Ukrainian potential described by The Great Continent is real – the technological defense ecosystem, the mastery of on-board artificial intelligence, the Diia application (although hacked by the Russians) as a model of digital administration. But this potential exists independently of the question of membership. Mobilize it does not require a promise of enlargement; it requires a structured partnership, equipped with financing, security guarantees and industrial cooperation mechanisms. Confusing the two is precisely what the Union has always done – and what has led it, in the Turkish case as in the Balkan case, to do so. the impasse.
The Great Continent is, on this point, eloquently silent. In a text of several thousand words devoted to the European integration of Ukraine, Turkey is not mentioned once. Neither do the Western Balkans. Armenia, whose Union has just precipitated a strategic rapprochement (May 5, 2026) in the context of a tense electoral deadline, is absent. This silence is not an omission – it is a presupposition: that we can think about enlargement towards the East without wondering what we do with open files, previous promises, superimposed geographies.
However, these files exist. And they pile up. Montenegro has been negotiating its accession since 2012 without a credible horizon. North Macedonia has been waiting since 2005, Albania since 2014, Serbia since 2012 – the latter maintaining relations with Moscow which make its candidacy politically ambivalent. The recent trip of President Emmanuel Macron to Montenegro, on June 4 and 5, 2026, is in this revealing respect: a diplomatic gesture, a signal of renewed interest, but not a policy We are reopening Balkan dynamics at a time when we are agitating the Ukrainian perspective, without anyone explaining by what institutional reform a Union of twenty-seven, already struggling to decide to decide. unanimity, would simultaneously absorb several new members with very disparate levels of development and political cultures.
The agreement with Armenia is perhaps the most troubling case. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has truly made a pro-European turn – his disillusionment with Russian abandonment during the Karabakh war of 2020 gives him a real popular base. But the agreement was rushed in an electoral context precisely, to contain a surge of pro-Russian forces. In doing so, the Union has reproduced exactly the logic that it criticizes Moscow: partnership as an instrument of retention in a zone of influence, neighborhood policy as geopolitical competition. It has negated itself as a political project of a different nature. signed an agreement of which no one knows how it relates to the Azerbaijani question, therefore with that of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose implicit consent conditions any balance in the region – so many knots that the agreement does not unravel but aggravates by ignoring them.
There is a contradiction in European thinking about enlargement that is never clearly formulated: the more the Union enlarges, the less it is capable of deepening; and the less it is capable of deepening, the less it can benefit from its enlargements. The entries of 2004 and 2007 considerably expanded the internal market and the demographic base of the Union – this is indisputable. They also fragmented the European Council, restored unanimity in structurally paralyzing foreign policy, and introduced East-West divisions on the rule of law, migration policy and relations with Moscow which have not been resolved twenty years later.
Integrating Ukraine – forty-four million inhabitants before the war, the third largest country in Europe, economy undergoing massive reconstruction – without prior institutional reform is to further dilute a Union already struggling to govern itself. The Draghi report said it differently, but with the same conclusion: Europe suffers from a decision deficit, not a territorial deficit. Deepening – qualified majority in foreign policy, federal budgetary capacity, governance of the euro zone – is the condition of any serious enlargement, not its opposite. Making enlargement the response to the crisis means treating the symptom by aggravating the cause.
This decision-making deficit has an additional dimension that is rarely mentioned: the European Parliament itself. A legitimate institution in principle, in practice it has become more of a chamber of political communication than a body of strategic deliberation. Its members, elected on national lists with a logic often more partisan than representative, are frequently figures in transit between two national mandates, ideological activists whose horizon is media visibility, or communicators keen to advance their point of view to the detriment of the patient construction of a common doctrine. The CFSP escapes them structurally – it is an intergovernmental competence – but Parliament votes on budgets, ratifies association agreements, adopts resolutions which create political precedents. Historically, it is in such forums that democracy has advanced! However, its positions on Ukraine, on Turkey, on the Balkans have often preceded or contradicted those of the member states, adding rhetorical excess where coherence was necessary. The short mandate, the absence of executive responsibility and the electoral bonus for strong declarations do not predispose to strategic rigor.
II. Temporary borders stacked
There is a date that the promoters of Ukrainian enlargement never cite: September 12, 1963. This is the year when the Ankara Association Agreement formally opened to Turkey the prospect of membership in the European Economic Community. Sixty-three years later, the candidacy is officially open – since 2005 –, officially frozen – since 2018 – but officially kept in an in-between space from which no one wants to leave. Neither adhesion nor clean break. A non-decision made into politics.
This half-century of indecision is not a diplomatic accident. It is the most precise revealer of the constitutive incapacity of the Union to define its own membership criteria. Because the Turkish question forces precisely the questions that the Union refuses to ask about itself: where does Europe stop? Geographically? Culturally? Historically? Is belonging defined by geography, by political values, by civilizational history, as the treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, politically adopted on October 29, 2024, buried for lack of ratification, wanted to establish? Or is it defined by a simple geostrategic calculation of the moment? The Union has never chosen – and this refusal of choice has become a doctrine by default.
If we apply the geostrategic criterion, Ankara wins over all the other candidates combined. Turkey controls the Bosphorus Strait, a maritime barrier between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the cardinal importance of which was highlighted by the war in Ukraine. It is NATO’s second largest army. In July 2022, it demonstrated its role as an irreplaceable intermediary on Ukrainian cereals, forcing an agreement where the Union had no direct leverage. It constitutes a buffer between Europe and the centers of instability in the Middle East, the Caucasus and the Black Sea simultaneously. If the criterion is the rule of law and judicial independence, it must be applied uniformly – which also disqualifies several Balkan candidates and seriously questions certain current member states. The Union has never decided. It preferred to let the Turkish question calcify, treating it as a cumbersome legacy rather than the test of consistency that it is.
The result is that any Eastern Neighborhood policy constructed without first resolving the Turkish question rests on a fissure. The arc which goes from the Balkans to Ukraine via the Caucasus necessarily crosses the area of Turkish influence and interest. Erdoğan understood this better than anyone – and he plays with it with a consistency that the Union, for lack of doctrine, can neither counter nor integrate.
The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO in 2023 and 2024 has dramatically reconfigured the strategic geography of the European North. The Baltic is now a quasi-internal sea of the Alliance. The land border between the European Union and Russia more than doubled overnight. The Scandinavian countries, which for decades have maintained a cautious relationship with European defense policy in the name of their traditional neutrality, are now at the heart of the system.
However, the Union drew no specific doctrinal consequences from it. The question of northern security has been entirely delegated to NATO – which is understandable in the urgency, but insufficient in the long term, especially in a context where American reliability has once again become a variable. security of submarine cables in the Baltic Sea, whose repeated incidents since 2022 suggest a systematic sabotage campaign, does not have an adequate European legal framework to respond to it. The Union’s Arctic policy remains embryonic in the face of Russian and Chinese ambitions in this area. management of the Russian-Finnish neighborhood – a border of 1,340 kilometers with a state at war – is not the subject of any common doctrine, each member state managing bilaterally what logic would like to treat collectively.
It is precisely here that the absence of PESC is felt most acutely. Not in the major media theaters – Ukraine, the Middle East – but in the interstitial spaces where the hybrid threat is exerted continuously, slowly, without crossing the thresholds which would trigger a collective response. The Union’s northern border is the border most exposed to this quiet war – and it has no doctrine.
The European Neighborhood Policy, designed in 2004 as an instrument for projecting stability to the periphery of the enlarged Union, has become a machine for producing obligations without the means to honor them. It has transformed the Union into a power bordering areas that it can neither integrate nor abandon – neither fully assume nor formally renounce. Its logic is self-perpetuating: the more unstable the neighborhood, the more the Union is tempted to extend it to stabilize it; and the more it extends it, the more it creates new unstable neighborhoods to manage.
In this space already saturated with broken promises, the Council of Europe adds an additional layer of confusion. A distinct institution from the Union – forty-six members, from Reykjavik to Tbilisi, from Dublin to Ankara – it operates in the same geographies with its own instruments: electoral observation missions, programs to strengthen the rule of law, democratic development projects whose proliferation is less of an ambition political than an institutional need to justify its existence. The result is a superposition of European actors with poorly differentiated mandates, speaking neighboring languages but without doctrinal coordination, and whose simultaneous presence in countries like Armenia, Georgia or Moldova produces less stability than confusion on what “Europe » really expects from them.
To think of a neighborhood policy extending to the Iranian border without having resolved the Turkish question, without a doctrine for the northern border, without institutional reform allowing the Union to decide collectively, and without having clarified the division of labor between its own instruments and those of the Council of Europe, is to superimpose a layer of indetermination over all the others. The Union has no border – it has stacked provisional borders, each one referring to the next one the resolution of questions that the previous one did not resolve. It is in this architecture of dodging that the CFSP has gradually emptied itself of all reality strategic.
III. Rebuilding the CFSP – conditions and requirements
Javier Solana left his position as high representative for the CFSP in December 2009, after ten years in office. This departure was not commemorated as a loss – it was absorbed into the mechanics of the institutional reform of the Treaty of Lisbon, of December 13, 2007, which created in the same movement the position of senior representative of the Union for foreign affairs and security policy, merged with that of vice-president of the Commission. On paper, a strengthening. In fact, the start of a dilution.
What Solana understood, and which his successors were unable to preserve, is that a foreign policy is not a portfolio of files – it is an incarnate doctrine. The European Security Strategy of 2003, written under his leadership, was a text in short, readable, endowed with a vision: a Europe as a civil power, projecting its stability through law and institutions, identifying its threats – terrorism, proliferation, failed states, organized crime – and its instruments. We could not share it; we could not ignore that it existed; common, which is the minimum condition of any policy.
Since 2009, this language has fragmented between Catherine Ashton, Federica Mogherini and Josep Borrell – three senior representatives with very different profiles and visions, each managing the urgency of the moment without being able to rely on doctrinal continuity. Kaja Kallas, former Estonian Prime Minister appointed High Representative since December 1, 2024, embodies this contradiction in her own way: no one disputes her intimate knowledge of the Russian threat, nor her credibility on the eastern flank. But her mandate comes up against the same structural paralysis as her predecessors. — Viktor Orbán, Hungarian Prime Minister, blocking or limiting the ambitions of a common position with a consistency that neither the pressure from Brussels nor that of the capitals has been able to lastingly correct. The Strategic Compass, adopted on March 25, 2022, is a serious and technically solid document. But a document is not a policy – and a policy without an embodied doctrine is only emergency administration.
Three prerequisites for any new credible CFSP emerge from this diagnosis – not as an ideal program, but as a functional minimum without which strategic ambitions will remain incantations.
The first is the qualified majority in foreign policy. Maintaining unanimity in this area has become a functional anomaly that each crisis makes more visible. The ability of a single member state to block or render meaningless a common position transforms the CFSP into diplomacy by the lowest common denominator. The phenomenon is structural and cannot be reduced to Budapest — Warsaw, under the government of JarosÅ‚aw KaczyÅ„ski, offered an equally paralyzing version on questions of the rule of law and relations with Moscow; it was only following an avoidance tactic adopted by London between November 1979 and June 2016. However, the Lisbon Treaty provides for bridging clauses allowing the qualified majority to be extended without formal revision of the treaties – they have never been activated, due to lack of political will. This is where this will must be exercised first.
The second condition is an autonomous strategic intelligence capacity, which requires the constitution of a real autonomous decision-making power, which the European Commission is not, despite the will of its President since December 1, 2019, Ursula von der Leyen. The Union remains structurally dependent on national services and, beyond that, on American services for its perception of threats and its assessment of situations. The disorganization of the American intelligence community under the administration of Donald Trump – partial dismantling of the structures inherited from post-September 11, affair of the Signal group, restructuring of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the coordination office of all sixteen American intelligence agencies – has made this suddenly untenable dependence. The Union Situation and Intelligence Center, INTCEN, established on March 18, 2012 from the creation of Solana in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, is an analysis organization based on voluntary national contributions, not a real autonomous collection capacity. As long as the Union does not have its own strategic knowledge instrument, it will be condemned to react to crises rather than anticipate them.
The third condition is a differentiated neighborhood doctrine. The current confusion between security partnership, economic association and accession perspective must end. These three levels correspond to radically different commitments, instruments and time horizons – treating them as interchangeable, according to the needs of the moment, is precisely what has emptied each of them of their credibility. A differentiated doctrine would also imply clarifying the border of competences between the Union and the Council of Europe in neighborhood areas – not to weaken the latter, but so that each institution speaks with an identifiable voice and consistent with its real mandate.
The Great Continent is right on one point: the Ukrainian potential is real, the Danish cooperation model is convincing, and Ukraine is already an actor in European security which it would be absurd not to take into account in the defensive architecture of the continent. None of the above disputes these findings. What is contested is the order of priorities and the nature of the response.
Ukraine deserves a serious European relationship – structured, with real security guarantees, backed by direct defense financing and deep industrial cooperation. It deserves to be integrated into the mechanisms for sharing intelligence, in the arms production chains, in the research and technological development networks that the war has made so visibly necessary. All of this is possible, urgent, and does not require a promise of membership to be implemented. It requires precisely what The Great Continent does not mention: a CFSP capable of carrying out these commitments in a coherent and sustainable manner.
Ukraine also deserves better than a promise which Turkey, since 1963, has known exactly what it is worth. Better than the fate of the Western Balkans, whose applications open for sometimes thirty years have produced neither accession nor renunciation, but this corrosive in-between which delegitimizes the Union as much as the governments which claim it. Better than the Armenian agreement recently signed in the urgency of a vote, without doctrine, without hierarchy of commitments, without vision of what Europe wants to be in this space.
It remains to be seen who will carry out this refoundation – and when. The honest answer is disappointing. France, the only capital capable of driving an initiative of this nature, has entered the long sequence which precedes the presidential election of April 2027: no government in a precarious position will take the risk of a major European proposal from which it would not see the fruits, and national political energy will gradually be absorbed by internal competition. Germany is still looking for its line after the Olaf Scholz years. And Giorgia Meloni’s Italy is looking elsewhere.
In this landscape, one variable is systematically underestimated: London. The post-Brexit United Kingdom has not disappeared from European strategic geography. It has retained its intelligence capabilities – among the most sophisticated in the Western world – its strategic culture forged over two centuries of power politics, its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and a professional army whose operational experience, even in a deplorable state, exceeds that of most of the Member States of the Union. The gradual rapprochement between London and Brussels, since the election of Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street, opens a window that the obsession with the eastern neighborhood tends to make us forget. A structured security and intelligence partnership with the United Kingdom – without reopening the Brexit file, without illusions about a return to the institutions – would be worth infinitely more for real European security than ten partnership agreements rushed towards the Caucasus. Bringing London back into the continent’s security architecture, which as a de facto member of NATO it is, is perhaps the most important strategic decision that the Union could take in the coming years – and the least publicized.
Reform decision-making in foreign policy, lead the Union to finally define its borders – not as a defensive line but as an assumed political framework –, provide it with an autonomous strategic intelligence capacity, rigorously distinguish the levels of its engagement with its neighbors: this is the agenda of a serious Europe. Not a new Far East. A Union which knows what it is – and which keeps its promises, precisely because it has stopped doing too much.
/2026/06/11/6a2a8294ada60297066700.jpg "Finale NBA : comment Victor Wembanyama et les Spurs ont dilapidé une avance de 29 points et perdu le match 4 crucial face aux New York Knicks")
