The German Marshall Fund recently released as part of its "On Wider Europe" series "Completing Europe," a commentary by Iris Kempe, Director of the Regional Office South Caucasus, Heinrich Boell Foundation. The commentary is a response to an earlier piece by Ronald Asmus, who expresses concern that "the historical window of opportunity for enlarging transatlantic and European institutions is coming to a close" and prescribes "a new moral and strategic narrative about why enlargement still matters." Answering Asmus' call, Kempe argues that the EU should commit "to begin telling the story of its completion" and to frame enlargement "as a finite and politically achievable goal" (finite, that is, in the sense of including all states who desire membership). She also says that recent EU reforms on foreign and neighborhood policies, which have recently come under criticism for seeking to abolish EU special representatives to the Caucasus and Moldova, potentially offer an improved framework for engaging the EU's eastern neighbors and "chang[ing] the debate on enlargement." Finally, she underlines that aspiring member-states retain the greatest burden for ensuring EU enlargement through their own governance progress, noting that "governments and public institutions will likely have to function at a level at least comparable to that of the Baltic states" before countries can even hope to become real candidates for EU membership. In an earlier entry in the "On Wider Europe" series, Sabine Fischer (International Crisis Group) and Pavol Demes (GMF) offer alternative strategies for the EU's most challenging engagement in the Eastern Neighborhood, with Belarus.
