Screening: the least dramatic and most consequential stage

Accession negotiations with the European Union formally opened at the first intergovernmental conference in June 2024. What followed through the rest of that year was screening, and screening is where accession is actually decided.

What screening is

The Commission and the candidate go through the entire body of EU law, chapter by chapter, and compare it line by line against what the candidate currently has. The output is a list: here you comply, here you partly comply, here you have nothing, here you have something incompatible that must go.

It is slow, technical and produces no photographs. It is also the moment at which the abstract ambition of membership becomes a specific list of several thousand obligations with names attached.

Why it is the decisive stage

Because after screening, nobody can claim not to know what is required. Every subsequent argument — about timing, about derogations, about resources — happens against an agreed inventory. Candidates that struggle usually struggle because they postponed confronting that inventory.

The war context

Ukraine is doing this while fighting, which has no precedent. The ministries running screening are the same ministries running wartime administration. That they are doing both at once is, to me, the more remarkable fact of this period.