Enlargement suddenly looks busy. On 14 July, the EU convened accession conferences with Ukraine, Moldova, Montenegro and Albania on the same day. Ukraine and Moldova opened negotiations on a new thematic cluster covering foreign, security, trade and defence policy. Albania provisionally closed three chapters — science and research, education and culture, and external relations. Montenegro closed another. Target dates have hardened into something close to a timetable: Montenegro by 2028, Albania by 2029, Ukraine and Moldova by 2030.
Set against that, the numbers are sobering. The Integration Readiness Index, published in June 2026 by the European Policy Innovation Council (EPIC) with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and authored by Antonios Nestoras, Emil Kirjas and Bernada Cunj, scores ten candidate countries from 0 to 10 across the years 2021 to 2025. The benchmark is not an abstraction. It is Croatia in 2011 — the last country to actually finish the process. On that scale, the front-runner is at 6.8.
Choosing Croatia 2011 as the reference point is the sharpest thing about the index. Accession debates usually run on adjectives: momentum, progress, backsliding, credibility. The Croatian file gives them a fixed point. By 2011 Croatia had closed its chapters, signed its accession treaty and was two years from membership. That is what a 10 looks like.
Measured against it, the 2025 field reads as follows. Montenegro 6.8. Albania 6.7. Moldova 5.87. Ukraine 5.85. Serbia and North Macedonia both 5.5. Then a long drop: Kosovo 3.61, Georgia 3.26, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2.91, Türkiye 2.81. Five of the ten sit below the midpoint. Four sit below 4.
The index is not a mood board. It runs five indicators — State of Play, Annual Progress, Recommendation Delivery, Chapter Status and Accession Momentum — and it draws exclusively on European Commission progress reports. That constraint matters. Every point deducted is a point the Commission itself documented. Where the scores are low, they are low because Brussels wrote them down.
The gap this exposes is between the diplomatic clock and the readiness clock. The diplomatic clock is running fast: conferences, clusters, closed chapters, target years. The readiness clock has barely moved for most of the field, and for several countries it is running backwards. Türkiye scored 3.25 in 2021 and 2.81 in 2025 — less ready after four years of formally being a candidate. Bosnia fell from 4.14 in 2024 to 2.91 in 2025, the sharpest single-year drop the index records, in the year after its negotiations were formally opened. Georgia slid from 4.06 in 2023 to 3.26 in 2025.
Even at the top, the arithmetic is unforgiving. Montenegro is targeting 2028 from 6.8. That is not a rounding error away from the finish line; it is roughly a third of the distance, to be covered in the hardest chapters, the rule-of-law ones, where progress is measured in institutional behaviour rather than legislative text. Ukraine and Moldova, at around 5.85, are aiming at 2030 while one of them is fighting a war and both face a Council in which any single capital can stall a cluster indefinitely.
None of this argues against enlargement. It argues against confusing the two clocks. A conference is an event. Readiness is a state.
The EU has spent three years rebuilding enlargement as a geopolitical necessity rather than a technical exercise, and the July conferences are the visible result. But an accession is not a summit; it is the moment a country's courts, procurement rules, statistical agencies and border services start working like everyone else's. EPIC's index is a useful discipline precisely because it refuses to score intent. If the target dates hold, they will hold because candidates closed a readiness gap that is currently between three and seven points wide — not because the calendar said so. And if they do not hold, the Commission will not be able to say it was surprised. The evidence was in its own reports.
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