From neighbourhood policy to accession chapters

Watched year by year, the process looked like a series of stalls. Watched across twenty, it is a fairly consistent progression, and setting out the sequence makes that visible.

The stages

A neighbourhood policy offering a framework for cooperation and explicitly not a membership perspective, which was the honest position at the time and was resented as such.

Then negotiation of an association agreement with a deep free trade area — a far more substantial instrument, requiring extensive legal approximation, and the object of the political crisis of 2013.

Then its entry into force, and the trade area operating.

Then visa liberalisation, which required a specific list of reforms — biometric documents, anti-corruption bodies, data protection, migration management — and which delivered a benefit ordinary people could use.

Then candidate status, then the opening of negotiations.

What each stage actually required

In every case, domestic legislation and institutions rather than declarations. The association agreement runs to hundreds of pages of annexes, each naming a directive and a deadline.

The work was technical throughout, and the political moments were points at which accumulated technical work was recognised.

The pattern worth noticing

Each stage was described at the time as an endpoint by those who wanted no more, and as insufficient by those who wanted more. Both were wrong each time.

What twenty years of it teaches

That the technical work is what moves, that the political recognition follows it, and that the recognition arrives at moments nobody predicted.

Having lived the twenty years one at a time, I can say this: each stage looked only slightly further on than the last while it was happening. The trajectory is clear only in retrospect. It reminds me of my own business — growth was never obvious in any single year and was obvious at the end of ten. What made the difference was not a leap but the direction never changing.