Strategic Policy Recommendations to Bolster EU Candidate Country Resilience until 2035
In a period of heightened geopolitical volatility and intensified external state pressure on the EU’s Candidate Countries (CCs), enlargement policy needs to increasingly function as a resilience policy. This is especially important because foreign influence from state actors has the potential to interfere with democratic and accession trajectories by weakening democratic safeguards, creating economic dependencies, and exploiting security vulnerabilities. For the EU, this creates a practical challenge: supporting CCs in withstanding foreign malign influence during the accession process while maintaining the credibility and transformative power of enlargement.
This policy brief responds to that challenge by presenting three forward-looking recommendations for the democratic, socio-economic, and security domains. Together, they aim at strengthening CC resilience to foreign malign influence while deepening their long-term integration into EU structures. Rather than offering comprehensive solutions, the recommendations are designed as targeted additions to the EU enlargement toolkit that remain credible and workable under different future conditions.
The recommendations were developed through a strategic foresight and policy design process within the REUNIR project. They draw on REUNIR’s scenarios, resilience assessments, and policy-gap analysis, and were refined in an in-person workshop in January 2026 with 12 experts from the project’s consortium member institutions.
During the workshop, participants first developed policy options for the three priority fields of action. Several robustness checks were then carried out, such as a ‘pre-mortem’ exercise and a scenario-based ‘wind tunnelling’ exercise using REUNIR scenarios for 2035. By building on and extending strategic policy design workshop method originally designed by Baykal and colleagues, the policy recommendations seek to be (a) anticipatory, (b) preventative, © ambitious but realistic, (d) targeted but robust, and (e) an addition (not ‘more of the same’).
The recommendations in this policy brief focus on three priority fields for action that remain insufficiently addressed in current EU policy. These fields were identified by experts during the workshop on the basis of REUNIR’s foresight and scenario analysis:
- Intensified infiltration of democratic institutions, undermining of institutional safeguards (rule of law, democracy) and instrumentalising of cultural influence [democracy domain].
- China and Gulf countries creating elite dependencies through economic investments (intensifying elite capture, non-inclusive growth) [socio-economic domain].
- Intensified security and military threats to CCs (nuclear weapons proliferation/use, arms sales, warfare, authoritarian cooperation) [security domain].
The Three Recommendations
Recommendation 1 (democratic domain): The European Commission, in cooperation with the European Economic and Social Committee, should establish an ‘EU + CC Civic Council’ as a formal channel between EU institutions and civil society to strengthen democratic oversight in the accession process and protect civic space.
Recommendation 2 (socio-economic domain): The European Commission should reduce state-capture risks in CCs by structurally integrating countries into EU innovation ecosystems, thereby accelerating high-value economic diversification through competitive funding, common standards, and cross-border partnerships.
Recommendation 3 (security domain): The European External Action Service, under the leadership of the High Representative/Vice-President, should create an EU+ security forum with CCs. This would help to strengthen resilience against external shocks, deepen practical security cooperation during the accession process, and lay the groundwork for stronger security assurances over time.
This study was originally published by REUNIR.
