Financial and Institutional Challenges of EU Enlargement

In the first episode of Henrik Enderlein Fellow Besa Shahini’s podcast miniseries exploring the EU accession process in the Western Balkans and the lessons for EU enlargement policy, she talks to Thu Nguyen and Johannes Lindner about the costs and necessary reforms tied to the next round of enlargement.

At the heart of the debate on further EU enlargement lie the issues of financing and facilitating the accession of current candidate countries. Together with her guests Thu Nguyen and Johannes Lindner, deputy director and co-director of the Jacques Delors Centre, Besa Shahini discusses their recent contributions to the debate. Together, they review the paper Johannes Lindner and Thu Nguyen co-authored, concluding that the next enlargement round will have a significantly lower impact on the EU budget than the numbers in a leaked paper from the European Council suggest. They discuss the report from the Franco-German expert group on EU institutional reforms, as well as new visions for an enlarged union.

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