If European enlargement has a star pupil, it is a country of barely 600,000 people. Montenegro tops EPIC's Integration Readiness Index (readinessindex.eu), a scorecard co-published with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation that measures how close each of the EU's ten candidate countries actually is to membership. Montenegro's score: 6.8 out of 10 — the highest in the field, just ahead of Albania's 6.7 and comfortably clear of everyone else.
What makes the index unusual is its discipline. Rather than rely on political mood or diplomatic signalling, EPIC — a Brussels policy institute — builds the score entirely from the European Commission's own annual progress reports between 2021 and 2025, graded across five indicators from the state of reforms to "accession momentum." The benchmark is Croatia in 2011, the last country to actually make it through the door. On that yardstick, Montenegro is closer than any current candidate. It is also, tellingly, still some way off.
Montenegro's lead is the product of a head start and a small, focused state. It opened accession talks back in 2012, earlier than any other current candidate, and has kept the process moving where others stalled. It has been a NATO member since 2017, already uses the euro (informally, without ever having joined the eurozone), and enjoys a rare cross-party consensus that Europe is the country's destiny. Prime Minister Milojko Spajić has made membership the government's defining mission: "By the end of the year, we will close all chapters and ensure that Montenegro becomes the EU's 28th member state in 2028," he has pledged.
The numbers are moving in his direction. By June 2026 Montenegro had provisionally closed 16 of its 33 chapters — roughly half — including recent deals on the free movement of workers and on consumer and health protection. EU enlargement commissioner Marta Kos says the country is advancing "at great speed." Brussels has even begun the technical groundwork for drafting an accession treaty, a step no other candidate is close to.
And yet 6.8 out of 10 is the giveaway. Even the best-prepared candidate is judged well short of fully ready — and the missing points cluster where they always do. Chapters 23 and 24, covering the judiciary, fundamental rights, and the fight against corruption and organised crime, remain the hardest to close. The Commission wants proof that reforms on paper have become reforms in practice — what officials call the shift "from a normative to a substantive approach." For a small state with entrenched patronage networks, that is the steepest part of the climb.
The contrast with the bottom of the table sharpens the picture. Turkey, once the EU's most strategically courted applicant, now scores just 2.81 and has slid backwards since 2021. Bosnia collapsed from 4.14 to 2.91 in a single year. Ukraine and Moldova, propelled by the war, have overtaken long-standing Western Balkan hopefuls Serbia and North Macedonia, both stuck on 5.5. The field is stratifying: a small group moving, a larger group stalled or sliding.
Montenegro is the test case for whether EU enlargement is still a real process or merely a rhetorical one. After two decades in which the Western Balkans were promised a future inside the Union and then left in the waiting room, Podgorica's 2028 target is the first credible date on the board. If it slips — if the rule-of-law benchmarks prove unmeetable, or if enlargement-weary member states find reasons to delay — the message to every other candidate, from Tirana to Kyiv, is that even doing everything right is not enough. If Montenegro makes it, the EU regains something it has lacked for years: proof that the door actually opens. The index can measure readiness. Whether readiness is rewarded is a political choice the EU has yet to make.
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