Podgorica: There is something counterintuitive about the way Brussels now treats the countries queuing to join it. For most of the enlargement era the deal was simple. Do the homework, pass the reforms, hold the votes, and membership, with its budgets and subsidies, would arrive at the end. The money came after the door opened, never before. That sequence is quietly being reversed.
Under the Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, and the parallel facilities built for Ukraine and Moldova, candidate states are now receiving substantial European funding while they are still candidates. Grants and cheap loans are released against specific reform milestones rather than held back until an accession treaty is signed. A country that opens its electricity market to regional competitors, or cleans up a public procurement system that has long leaked money to the politically connected, can see the next tranche land in its treasury within months. The reward and the reform have been pushed closer together.
The logic behind this is partly an admission of failure. Waiting a decade or more for the prize stopped working. Enthusiasm faded between summits, governments that staked their credibility on Europe were punished by voters for having little to show, and rival powers were happy to offer cash and infrastructure with far fewer questions attached. Montenegro has been negotiating since 2012 and is only now closing its final chapters. A teenager who was born when those talks began can vote in the next election. Front-loading the benefits is an attempt to make the journey feel worth taking before the destination is reached.
There is also a harder strategic calculation. Since the war in Ukraine, enlargement has stopped being a managerial process about regulatory alignment and become a question of where the edge of the European order will sit. Leaving a band of unfinished states between the Union and its more assertive neighbours now looks less like patience and more like a vacuum waiting to be filled. Spending money inside those states, on energy links, transport corridors and digital networks that plug them into the single market, is a way of pulling them in before the formal vote that any one member government could still block.
The risks are obvious to anyone who remembers earlier rounds. Money released against milestones is only as good as the body checking whether the milestones were truly met, and the Union has a patchy record of holding the line once funds are flowing. Pour resources into a state whose courts are not yet independent and the cash can entrench the very networks that reform was meant to dislodge. Brussels insists this time the payments are reversible and the conditions are stricter, with disbursements that can be paused if backsliding sets in. Whether it has the stomach to freeze money over a government it is simultaneously trying to keep onside is the question that will define the policy.
For the candidate capitals the shift is welcome but double-edged. The funding is real and immediate, yet it raises expectations that membership is close when the final decision still rests on unanimity among existing members, some of whom are in no hurry. Paying in advance buys goodwill and momentum. It does not buy the votes that still have to be cast in the capitals that already hold a seat at the table. The wager Brussels is making is that money spent now will make those votes easier later. It is a reasonable bet, but it is a bet, and the bill is being paid up front.
