Geopolitics and the Justification of Enlargement: The European Parliament before and after Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Abstract

EU enlargement has returned to the centre of European politics after years of stagnation and enlargement fatigue. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 renewed political attention to enlargement and raised questions about how accession is justified in a changing geopolitical environment. While existing literature has extensively examined enlargement as a process of domestic transformation and, more recently, as a politicised policy domain, less recent attention has been paid to how enlargement is justified under conditions of geopolitical crisis. This thesis addresses this gap by examining how the war in Ukraine transformed rhetorical justifications of EU enlargement in the European Parliament. Drawing on realism, liberal intergovernmentalism, and constructivism, I analyse parliamentary speeches from the ninth legislative cycle (2019–2024) using a mixed-method content analysis. Enlargement justifications are coded as geopolitical, economic, or normative and compared across the pre-invasion and post-invasion periods. The findings show that geopolitical justifications increased substantially after 2022 and became the dominant frame in enlargement discourse. Normative justifications remained important but were increasingly linked to geopolitical arguments, while economic justifications played a more limited role than expected. These findings contribute to debates on EU enlargement, politicisation, rhetorical action, and the changing role of geopolitics in European integration.