Enlargement Reinvented: The EU’s Protean and Control Power in the Eastern Neighbourhood & Western Balkans

This article argues that the recent reactivation of enlargement policy represents a strategic attempt to navigate heightened security-induced uncertainty that is destabilizing the Europe. Against this backdrop, the central question is: to what extent has the EU’s post-2022 enlargement strategy been repurposed through the incorporation of protean policy instruments, and how has this affected the EU’s traditional conditionality-based control mechanisms in the Western Balkans and the Eastern Neighbourhood? The paper argues that, in the post-2022 security context, the EU has shifted from conceiving security as the end point of integration to instrumentalizing security within the enlargement process itself. Moreover, it maintains that, during 2004–2021, the EU primarily relied on controlbased power mechanisms, with only rare protean interventions. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and subsequent EU engagement with enlargement as a security instrument, the EU’s external governance strategy has come to reflect a strategic blend of protean and control power