For twenty years, the mental map of EU enlargement had a clear order: the Western Balkans first, everyone else later. A new index suggests that order no longer holds.
EPIC's Integration Readiness Index, published with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, scores ten candidate countries from zero to ten, year by year, between 2021 and 2025. It draws on a single source: the European Commission's own annual progress reports. The benchmark is Croatia, the last country to finish the journey and join in 2013. Five components feed each score — the state of play, annual progress, how many Commission recommendations a country actually delivers, the status of its negotiating chapters, and its overall accession momentum.
The 2025 table reads, top to bottom: Montenegro 6.8, Albania 6.7, Moldova 5.87, Ukraine 5.85, Serbia 5.5, North Macedonia 5.5, Kosovo 3.61, Georgia 3.26, Bosnia 2.91, and Türkiye 2.81.
Look at the middle of that list. Moldova and Ukraine — both granted candidate status only in 2022, after Russia's invasion — now sit above Serbia and North Macedonia, two countries that have been negotiating for far longer. Serbia opened talks in 2014; North Macedonia has been a candidate since 2005. On the Commission's own paperwork, the newcomers are converging on EU rules faster than the veterans.
That is the quiet story the index tells. Enlargement is no longer a queue ordered by how long you have waited. It is a race decided by momentum.
The data carries a 2025 vintage. What has happened since largely confirms it.
In June, EU governments opened the first negotiating cluster — the fundamentals, covering rule of law and democratic institutions — with Ukraine. In July, ambassadors unblocked the cluster on external relations, and Ukraine and Moldova formally opened it on 14 July. Moldova has moved on five chapters. Four clusters remain blocked, held up mainly by Hungary, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Serbia is the counterpoint. Its talks have not meaningfully advanced since December 2021. This summer the Commission recommended opening a new cluster, arguing Belgrade had done enough to move forward. Eight member states said no, citing Serbia's rule-of-law record and its refusal to align with EU sanctions on Russia. The readiness gap and the political gap now point the same way.
None of this dethrones the front-runners. Montenegro (6.8) and Albania (6.7) remain the two most advanced candidates, and both had a strong July: Montenegro closed two more negotiating chapters, taking it to roughly half of the 33, with Prime Minister Milojko Spajić still targeting membership by 2028. Albania closed its first three chapters and wants to conclude talks by 2027.
So the top of the table is still Balkan. The shift is underneath it — where two war-time applicants have climbed past countries that assumed their place in line was secure.
Readiness is not membership. A high score on an index built from progress reports does not shorten the last, hardest stretch — the unanimous vote of 27 governments, any one of which can stall the process, as Hungary keeps demonstrating. Nor does it settle the political questions: absorbing Ukraine would reshape the EU's budget, its farm policy and its voting maths.
But the index reframes the debate. For years, the case against fast-tracking Ukraine and Moldova rested on an assumption that they were simply less prepared than the Balkans. The Commission's own reports no longer support that. If enlargement stalls now, it will be a political choice — not a verdict on readiness. And that puts the pressure squarely back on the member states.
