The Case for Sequencing Is Made. The Conditions Are Not.

When a veteran Financial Times Europe editor endorses the Rama-Vučić proposal, the initiative graduates from regional politics into European policy debate. The harder work starts there.

by the Editorial Board

Tony Barber is not the first serious analyst to look at the western Balkans enlargement impasse and conclude that the Rama-Vučić single market and Schengen proposal deserves genuine engagement. He is, however, one of the most credible. A long-serving Financial Times Europe editor with decades of reporting from the region, including a demonstrated familiarity with Albania specifically, his endorsement of the initiative in EUalive today is a signal that the proposal has moved beyond the register of regional special pleading into the broader European policy conversation. That matters, and it should be said plainly before anything else.

Barber’s diagnosis is correct. EU enlargement has been effectively paused for more than a decade. The obstacles are structural: political resistance in western European societies, institutional reforms Brussels has deferred, and reform deficits in candidate countries themselves. Full membership, in his assessment, will remain elusive in the near term. The Rama-Vučić proposal, which would grant candidate countries access to the single market and Schengen travel zone without the institutional disruptions of full accession, offers a practical route through the deadlock. Barber endorses it, notes that similar thinking has circulated in Berlin and Paris, and calls on Europe to implement it.

The argument is sound as far as it goes. Where it invites further development is in the question Barber raises but does not press: conditionality.

Single market access is not a governance-free arrangement. It requires regulatory alignment, judicial cooperation, enforcement capacity, and sustained political will on both sides. Barber acknowledges this in a single line: “much hard work on reforms is still needed.” The line appears twice in his piece, both times in passing. It functions as a caveat rather than a condition, and that distinction matters enormously for whether the proposal succeeds or becomes another mechanism through which the western Balkans are offered proximity to Europe without the substance of it.

The sequencing logic only holds if it remains genuinely conditional. Foreign policy alignment with the EU, rule of law benchmarks, and visible progress on unresolved bilateral tensions must be measurable components of any phased approach, not aspirational footnotes. Without that linkage, integration risks becoming detached from reform. The proposal’s value is not only economic. It is, as Barber correctly identifies, geopolitical: a way of anchoring the region before competing influences fill the vacuum that enlargement paralysis has created. But geopolitical anchoring through economic integration only works if the anchor holds. Conditionality is the anchor.

There is also the German test, which Barber gestures toward without naming. Berlin will examine any sequencing proposal through three questions: whether integration is tied to enforceable reform benchmarks, whether it reinforces foreign policy alignment with the EU, and whether it contributes to regional stabilisation rather than freezes unresolved tensions. Germany remains central to any enlargement trajectory. Without Berlin’s confidence, sequencing remains theory. The Rama-Vučić joint op-ed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was addressed to that audience deliberately. Whether it converts into structured dialogue on the proposal’s parameters is the next test of whether the initiative is serious.

Barber has rendered a service by bringing this argument into the mainstream European conversation. But the proposal’s fate will not be decided by the quality of the case made for it. It will be decided by whether the EU is willing to attach real conditions to the integration it offers, and whether candidate countries are willing to meet them. That is the test the Rama-Vučić initiative now faces. Enthusiasm from credible voices is a necessary condition for progress. It has never been a sufficient one.

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