Europe is a vast idea. How does Ukraine fit in?

If the leaders of the European Union listened only to their hearts, they’d fully embrace Ukraine into the bloc at their summit in Brussels this month. As French President Emmanuel Macron put it, “We feel in our heart that Ukraine, through its fight and its courage, is already today a member of our Europe, of our family and of our union.” In that spirit, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, went to Kyiv in April and personally handed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy the application questionnaire.
Europeans have not only hearts but also heads. And the heads of many leaders and Eurocrats — including Macron’s — are shaking rather than nodding.
Giving full membership to Ukraine now would create so many new problems for the EU that the bloc — never a paragon of effective governance to begin with — might break down, or even apart. The same warning applies to accepting Moldova or Georgia, and even Albania, North Macedonia and the other Balkan nations already in the queue.
Rushing their memberships would be a bad idea not only because these countries — their economies, judiciaries and other institutions — aren’t ready. It would also be reckless because the EU has never resolved an intrinsic tension between what Eurocrats call “widening” and “deepening” — that is, admitting new members vs integrating the existing ones.
With each of the seven rounds of enlargement — from the original six countries to the 27 today — running the show has become messier and more unwieldy. The growing number of institutions and Commissioners — each country appoints one — is the least of it, as is the Babel-like chaos of languages, traditions and national interests. The real problem is that the EU, as it grew, didn’t rewrite its treaties thoroughly enough to allow the bloc to stay coherent and deal with real-world problems.
Often a single country can veto joint action even when it’s urgent. An egregious recent example is Hungary, which held up the EU’s sixth sanctions package against Russia for weeks, and even then signed off only after blackmailing the other 26 countries to make changes that range from self-serving to bizarre.
These design flaws all but condemn the EU to failure whenever a big problem turns up. Lacking a common fiscal policy, the bloc barely saved its currency union during the euro crisis, and may yet lose it in a future upheaval. Unable to reform its migrant regime, it was bitterly split during the refugee crisis of 2015. In foreign and defense policy, the EU (as distinct from individual member states, like France) is a joke. Thank goodness the West still has that other Brussels institution called Nato.
In these examples, the shocks are exogenous — imported from the US after the financial crisis, from Syria and elsewhere when the refugees arrived, from Russia when its president, Vladimir Putin, turned full-bore totalitarian. But the tremors are just as often internal. For years, “Brussels” has been irate at Budapest and Warsaw, where populist quasi-autocrats are undermining the domestic rule of law and other democratic institutions. But the EU has no mechanism to kick out errant members, and even censuring them is difficult.

—Bloomberg