After Iceland’s European Union referendum, the bloc’s next big enlargement test lies on the Adriatic, where delay carries a strategic cost.
Iceland’s rejection of renewed EU accession talks will not push the country out of Europe. Iceland already belongs to the European Economic Area and the Schengen zone. It has access to the Single Market, applies much EU law and can afford to keep the political part of membership at arm’s length.
Montenegro is in the opposite position. It does not want an à la carte relationship with the European Union. It has spent 14 years negotiating full membership, has opened all 33 chapters and provisionally closed 18. Its problem is not how to remain comfortably outside the EU, but whether years of reform will end in membership or in another form of permanent waiting.
That distinction matters because countries are not strategically important in proportion to their population or GDP. Montenegro has fewer than 650,000 people and would have a negligible effect on the EU budget. Yet it occupies a sensitive part of the Adriatic, is a NATO member, borders the Union and sits inside a Western Balkan region where European, Russian, Chinese and Turkish interests meet. Its political direction matters beyond its economic weight.
Montenegro has not completed every reform. The rule of law, judicial independence, corruption, public administration, and media freedom still require measurable progress. The accession process must remain based on results. Lowering the conditions to manufacture a geopolitical success would damage both Montenegro and the EU.
But conditionality works only if meeting the conditions produces a credible outcome. If the benchmarks keep moving, or gradual access to the single market becomes a substitute for political membership, reform loses its reward. A country can adopt rules for years without gaining a vote over those rules. That arrangement may be tolerable for a wealthy EEA state that chose it. It is much less stable for a candidate that was promised a route to full membership.
Security makes the cost of delay easier to see. The European Parliament has welcomed Montenegro’s full alignment with EU foreign and security policy, including sanctions against Russia. In the same resolution, it warned of persistent foreign interference and disinformation intended to weaken the country’s European and NATO orientation, identifying malign influence from Russia and Serbia among the threats.
These pressures are sometimes used to describe Montenegro as a possible Trojan horse. That gets the sequence wrong. Foreign influence is not a reason to leave a compliant candidate indefinitely exposed; it is a reason to complete integration once the agreed conditions are met. Political uncertainty creates economic uncertainty, discourages investment in institutions and gives anti-European actors an easy message: Brussels will always find another reason to delay.
In a small, tourism-dependent economy, political instability travels quickly into business decisions. A prolonged institutional dispute can delay public investment, weaken regulatory enforcement and make long-term capital more cautious. EU membership would not remove those risks, and Brussels cannot solve Montenegro’s internal politics. A credible accession path would, however, make the cost of reversing reforms clearer and give investors, public officials and voters a firmer point of reference.
The EU must also be careful about the standard it applies. Montenegro has maintained alignment with sanctions despite the domestic political cost. Meanwhile, Russia was still the EU’s second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas in 2025, accounting for 13.9 per cent of imports. This does not excuse Russian influence in Montenegro, nor does it make the two situations identical. It does show why lectures about geopolitical reliability carry more weight when the Union is candid about its own remaining dependencies.
What should Brussels do? First, keep the reform requirements strict and public. Second, state clearly what follows when they are fulfilled. Third, treat access to EU programmes and the single market as preparation for membership, not as a comfortable holding pattern. And finally, judge Montenegro by both its domestic reforms and the strategic cost of leaving the accession process unresolved.
Completing Montenegro’s accession would not settle every dispute in the Western Balkans. It would do something more practical: prove that the process can still reach a conclusion. That evidence is now more valuable than another declaration that enlargement remains a geopolitical priority.
Iceland can choose the market without the politics because its security, prosperity and institutional position make that choice sustainable. Montenegro cannot be treated as a poorer version of the same model. It is small enough for the EU to absorb without financial disruption, but strategically placed enough that prolonged ambiguity carries a price.
The next enlargement will say more about the European Union than the size of the country joining it. If Montenegro completes the work and still finds the door closed, the message across the Western Balkans will be unmistakable: the process offers integration, but not necessarily membership. That would be a gift to every power that benefits from keeping the region unsettled.
Photo: Dreamstime.