Montenegro, a country of roughly 620,000 people and smaller than many European cities, has managed to place itself at the centre of the EU enlargement debate. Nestled between Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, and the Adriatic Sea, Montenegro is not just a candidate for European Union membership, it is, in many ways, a living experiment in what it means to belong to Europe in an era of renewed great-power competition.
The country applied for EU membership in 2008, was granted candidate status in 2010, and opened formal accession negotiations in 2012. For much of the decade that followed, progress was slow and fitful, and negotiations were effectively frozen in 2018 due to a lack of substantial progress in the rule-of-law area. Corruption persisted, judicial independence remained elusive, and the political will to push through genuinely difficult reforms was frequently overwhelmed by short-term interests.
The EU watched and waited, then Russia invaded Ukraine.
What followed was a structural reorientation of European foreign policy, including its enlargement process. Russia’s full-scale wa r on Ukraine revived the role of EU enlargement policy as an important foreign policy tool, bringing the prospect of membership a step closer for Ukraine, Moldova, and the Western Balkans.
Montenegro, already a NATO member since 2017 and formally aligned with EU sanctions against Russia, found itself recast from a stalled candidate into a strategic asset. The European Commission’s 2025 Enlargement Package confirmed that Montenegro had closed four negotiation chapters over the preceding year, a pace unmatched since the process began. By early 2026, 14 of the 33 negotiating chapters had been provisionally closed, with the remaining 19 expected to be finalised by the end of the year with the stated goal of its membership as the EU’s 28th state by 2028. Montenegro is now considered the bloc’s “frontrunner and best performing candidate”.
Yet, the hardest chapters – 23 and 24, covering the judiciary, fundamental rights, and justice – remain open, and analysts are frank about what that means. Reforms in the most sensitive areas remain “slow, inconsistent, and often shaped by short-term political interests,” while political polarisation and institutional blockages further undermine the stability required for sustained progress. Closing all chapters by 2026 is possible, as some researchers argue, “only in formal terms and if the EU chooses to prioritise geopolitical considerations”; a tension that cuts to the heart of the entire enlargement debate.
That tension is not accidental, it reflects a deeper transformation in how Brussels thinks about its own borders. Russia’s invasion has thrust enlargement back atop the EU agenda as a defensive bulwark, moving the project from expansive growth to protective consolidation.
The EU’s turn toward what analysts are now calling “geopolitical enlargement” marks a potential shift from technocratic to strategic thinking. Montenegro sits at the centre of this shift, it shares an ethnic, religious and linguistic identity with Serbia, a country that maintains close ties with both Moscow and Beijing while pursuing its own EU candidacy on its own terms. It carries a billion-dollar Chinese loan for an unfinished highway that nearly pushed it to bankruptcy. And within its own fragile governing coalition, pro-Serbian and pro-Russian politicians hold significant parliamentary weight, complicating the country’s internal coherence on European issues.
Montenegro is not simply a country on its way to joining the European Union, it is a country that is simultaneously reforming, resisting, and being pulled in multiple directions. Understanding how these forces interact, and what they reveal about the EU’s enlargement strategy, is a question about what kind of Europe is being built, and on what terms.
The country’s path to EU membership is shadowed by two forms of external influence that operate at very different registers: one cultural and political, the other financial and infrastructural, both of which reveal something about the quality, not just the pace, of Montenegro’s European journey.
Russia’s influence over Montenegro runs through identity, religion, and political kinship. The Serbian Orthodox Church – the dominant religious institution in the country – functions, in practice, as one of the most effective conduits of Serbian and, by extension, Russian cultural influence. Disinformation campaigns targeting Montenegro’s NATO membership and EU aspirations have been part of a broader strategy to exploit internal divisions and realign the country toward the so-called “Serbian World”, a geopolitical concept aimed at consolidating Serbian cultural and political dominance across the region.
The consequences are visible inside the government itself; the prime minister leads a fragile coalition that includes pro-Serbian and pro-Russian politicians. Although formally pro-European, significant parts of the ruling majority are increasingly anti-Western and pro-Russian in substance; anti-EU and anti-NATO narratives have become more visible and effective across the media environment, contributing to declining public support for integration: according to the latest Balkan Barometer, public support for EU membership fell to 39% in 2024, a dramatic drop from the near-80% recorded just a year earlier, and a sign that something has shifted in the public mood that no chapter closure can easily reverse.
China’s influence is a different kind of problem; more visible, more quantifiable, but perhaps more easily misread. The Bar-Boljare highway, the flagship infrastructure project financed by a nearly one-billion-dollar loan from the Export-Import Bank of China and built by the China Road and Bridge Corporation, has become the most cited example of Beijing’s footprint in the Western Balkans.
Often described as “the world’s most expensive road”, the project has strained public finances and sparked debate about what Beijing’s infrastructure diplomacy actually means for small, debt-exposed states. When the pandemic struck and Montenegro’s debt ratio surged past 90% of GDP, the government announced in 2021 that it could not service the Chinese loan and was facing bankruptcy. European and American banks stepped in to restructure the debt, bringing the ratio back toward 60%, but the contracts had included clauses allowing China to claim strategic assets, including port access rights, in lieu of cash repayment, a kind of dependency that might become an issue along the way.
Documents relating to the project were classified as secret by the Montenegrin government, and the opaque bidding process created ample opportunities for corruption. The Chinese loan was accepted because domestic governance structures were too weak, too captured, or too short-sighted to resist the appeal of visible, fast infrastructures. In this sense, China did not create Montenegro’s vulnerabilities, it just found them.
This brings us to the question that the chapters-closed count cannot answer: is Montenegro genuinely ready to join the EU?
The key domestic obstacle has been identified by civil society observers as the “lack of genuine political will and value-based leadership”; Constitutional Court appointments remain blocked by political deadlock; the media regulator is still without a properly appointed council, undermining the very chapter on media freedom that has been provisionally closed.
A stable track record in the rule of law, especially in high-level corruption and organised crime cases, greater efficiency and independence of the judiciary, and credible protection of fundamental rights and media freedom is what have to happen next.
Answering the previous question about Montenegro’s readiness to join, it looks formally encouraging, but substantially not fully yet. The Government has carried out no serious structural reform yet, the quality of the implementation of EU directives is still weak, and the rule of law situation remains problematic.
The problem here is evident: the EU is using Montenegro as a successful showcase to demonstrate that the enlargement works, in a moment in which the Union needs it for security and geopolitical reasons. But by doing so, there is a high risk to recreate structural conditions that made country as Hungary a source of internal problems.
A geopolitical enlargement approach operates as a security-driven layer added to the traditional transformative enlargement approach, generating new trade-offs for the EU’s internal coherence.
Once the EU signals that accession is a geopolitical priority, candidate countries gain leverage; the conditionality that was supposed to drive genuine transformation becomes, in this logic, a formality to be managed rather than a standard to be met.
The deeper risk is not that Montenegro will fail to join the EU, it is that it will succeed, but on terms that store up problems for later. Fast-tracking accession for geopolitical reasons alone carries its own risks and broader consequences; if not approached sensibly, it could undermine the credibility that enlargement has built over decades. The Hungary and Slovakia precedents are active warnings about what happens when membership is treated as an end point rather than a sustained process of democratic consolidation.
The EU faces a genuine dilemma that its own rhetoric has so far obscured: admitting Montenegro with unreformed institutions, a judiciary that lacks genuine independence, and a governing coalition that contains actors whose commitment to European values is, at best, instrumental, does not resolve the problem of Russian and Chinese influence in the Balkans.
A Montenegro that enters the EU because it was strategically convenient, rather than because it was genuinely transformed, will not be a success story, but a possible deferred problem that Europe will have to face.
If the EU is serious about enlargement as a tool of stability rather than a source of future internal dysfunction, it needs to do three things differently: reform how it measures readiness, invest more credibly in the conditions that make readiness possible, and stop treating the accession process as a binary – in or out – when the reality is far more granular.
A membership that arrives without genuine transformation will not be stable, a transformation that arrives without membership will not be sustained. The task for the EU is to hold both truths at once, and to build a path that honours them.