Brussels lacks administrative capacity to manage accelerating EU enlargement

The European Commission is running short on administrative capacity to manage multiple accession negotiations simultaneously. The executive’s Directorate-General for Enlargement and the Eastern Neighbourhood faces a mounting workload as the expansion drive accelerates faster than institutional resources can support.

More negotiating chapters have closed in the past six months than in the previous decade. This surge is driven by rapid progress from candidate nations, creating a severe strain on the department responsible for overseeing their integration.

Montenegro is currently drafting its accession treaty with the aim of becoming the twenty-eighth member state by 2028. Establishing a dedicated task force for Podgorica required reallocating officials from other Western Balkan nations, while Albania hopes to begin its own treaty work early next year.

The department relies heavily on temporary contracts and suffers from high staff turnover, leaving few permanent officials with experience in closing negotiations. The last country to join the bloc was Croatia in 2013. "The Commission has lost the institutional memory and capacity of the last enlargement wave," an anonymous official stated.

Complicating matters further, Iceland will hold a referendum on 29 August regarding the resumption of its accession path. Meanwhile, Ukraine and Moldova recently opened two negotiating chapters, with political pressure to open the remaining four clusters before the end of the year.

Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is pushing for a more gradual approach for domestic political reasons. Under the current methodology, no nation has ever opened all negotiating clusters at once, and even Albania took over a year to formally open all of them despite moving exceptionally fast.

This administrative bottleneck creates uncertainty for businesses and investors anticipating access to the expanded single market. Prolonged negotiations delay the legal integration required to harmonize regulations, complicating cross-border trade and long-term investment planning across the continent.

Candidate countries are also reaching their operational limits, as neither Kyiv nor Chișinău has previously managed legal integration of this complexity. The Council of the European Union and individual member states are similarly scrambling to build the internal capacity required to process these expansions.

Brussels has made enlargement a cornerstone of its foreign policy, but officials admit that advancing with so many nations requires re-prioritising internal resources. The Commission must now prove it can match its political ambitions with adequate administrative allocation in the coming months.