Enlargement was once the European Union’s most successful foreign policy. Today, for the countries still waiting at the door, it has become a slow exercise in managed disappointment.
Each stalled chapter produces the same response from Brussels: quiet diplomacy, careful statements, and very little public pressure on governments that have learned to game the process.
The silence has a cost. It is paid by the journalists, judges and civil-society activists who were promised that Europe would stand behind them.