Costa: Enlargement to Western Balkans a priority, but reforms are needed

BRUSSELS - For the EU, enlargement to the Western Balkans, Ukraine and Moldova is the main priority, but numerous reforms need to be carried out to deliver on all of the Copenhagen criteria as the enlargement is merit-based, says European Council President Antonio Costa.

"At the same time, we need to have a sense of urgency of the enlargement. Then, we need also to look at our internal reforms, (at) what we need to do internally on this," Costa said in an interview for the European Newsroom (ENR), which Tanjug is a part of.

"And then we need to manage this enlargement process with a lot of creativity (while) not giving up on our criteria, on our merit basis, but with a huge sense of urgency to deliver on this. I count on full collaboration from the 27 member states and the eight candidate countries," Costa said in response to a question whether some Western Balkan states could join the EU by 2030.

Asked by Tanjug if he would back membership without the right of veto, which is supported by Albania and Serbia, Costa responded:

"If you look at the previous seven enlargement processes, in all of them you had some transitional clauses, provisional clauses, progressive integration clauses and, for sure, in the upcoming enlargement, we will also need some kind of transitional period."

"Our most important goal is to keep our unity and to ensure unity on diversity," he also said.

"I do not like expressions like two speeds on different concentric circles, but, in fact, our union is already a union with a different geometry. Some member states are not in the Schengen area, others are not in the euro area, others are neither in the euro area nor in the Schengen area, and, in the future, we can imagine that some member states will not enter all these dimensions of the union immediately and that some members that are already in the union will allow them to step back because it is clear that some member states are not comfortable anymore with the level of integration that we have achieved," Costa added.