Ukraine opens the 'fundamentals' chapter. In Brussels, it is the least exciting meeting of the week

The chapter is called “fundamentals” and covers the rule of law, judicial independence, and the functioning of democratic institutions. In Kyiv they have been treating it as a formality for weeks, and nobody in this room corrects them. The truth is that the Union has one measuring stick for these things, the same one for twenty years, and applying it to one more country is desk work, not a battle.

The Ukrainian delegation arrived with its dossiers already filled in. That is the advantage of an enlargement that has long since stopped happening in lurches: whoever joins knows in advance what they are getting into, because the grid is public, identical for everyone, and does not shift depending on who is sitting on the Council that semester. A Warsaw official who entered in 2004 under very different uncertainty shrugged yesterday. “Back then we were still negotiating what the words meant. Now the words are fixed. What remains is counting the courts.”

Not that friction is absent. Three capitals are holding firm on the protection of linguistic minorities and want written guarantees before the next stage; the dossier on Ukraine’s judiciary still has two paragraphs marked in red. But these are frictions within a framework that holds, not frictions over the framework itself. Nobody in this room is debating whether the Union has the right to ask those things: even those who object take it as given.

The point that would sound incredible to a journalist from another Europe is precisely this: that the accession of a large frontier country has become an administrative procedure, governed by deadlines, with no veto hanging overhead like a sword. Somewhere, I imagine, someone would still treat the same dossier as a weapon, capital by capital. Here it gets stamped. Less epic. It works.