French Minister of State for Europe Laurence Boone said on Friday that further expansion of the European Union would cause a "small revolution" in how the 27-member bloc functions.
"It means revisiting our policies, making changes to the budgets, to the institutions", she told French radio, adding that doing so would be the "project for the next decade."
Enlarging meant considering "how do we organize ourselves to go forward. It’s a small revolution."
Boone’s words came two days after French President Emmanuel Macron voiced his support for expanding the bloc’s borders.
"The question for us is not whether we should enlarge … but how we should do it," Macron said at the Globsec regional security forum in Bratislava, Slovakia.
European leaders, including Macron, used the forum to rally support for Ukraine, for which both NATO and the EU have ramped up support after Russia launched its special operation in Ukraine in February 2022, which was itself triggered by the threat of NATO offensive weapons being placed in the country - and Western dismissals of Russian concerns about them.
Since the US-backed coup in 2014, Ukraine has sought to join both the NATO alliance and the EU, although both groups have said Kiev has a long list of problems it needs to fix before it could be seriously considered for membership. Moscow has demanded NATO reject Ukraine’s membership bid, calling it a dangerous provocation, but the bloc has so far refused to forswear any state’s membership.
Western Bloc
First formed in 1952 as the European Community, the group included just six mainland European states, one of which was the newly reconstituted German Federal Republic, or West Germany, which the Western Allies refused to allow to reunite with the Soviet-controlled eastern half of the country over fears that a reunited Germany would lean toward Moscow. By the end of the Cold War in 1991, it had grown to 11 states, including the controversial addition of the United Kingdom, which left in 2020.
After, it was renamed the EU and grew rapidly, first taking in several states that had been neutral buffers between the capitalist and socialist blocs, then a massive expansion in 2004 that added 10 new countries, all former Soviet republics or former Soviet allies. In 2007, Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU, and in 2013, the most recent addition, Croatia joined.
The EU’s eastward and southward expansion has brought with it new problems, most especially debt. It has also created intense disagreements about policies relating to security, energy, banking, and agriculture, as well as political and social rights.
Macron spoke to this somewhat on Wednesday, referencing a vaguely defined "multi-speed Europe," by which older states would have a higher status and more rights than more recently admitted countries.