Antonios Nestoras, Founder and CEO of the European Policy Innovation Council, participated in the Green Transition Forum 6.0 in Sofia, contributing to the discussion on smart simplification, market integration, and the economic foundations of Europe’s future enlargement.
His intervention focused on the link between enlargement and competitiveness. Enlargement is often presented as a geopolitical necessity — and rightly so. But it is also an economic, regulatory, and administrative challenge. For candidate countries to join the European Union successfully, they must be able not only to adopt the acquis, but to operate inside an increasingly complex European regulatory system.
This creates a difficult tension. On the one hand, the EU needs enlargement to project stability, credibility, and geopolitical influence. On the other hand, the EU’s own regulatory complexity can make accession harder, especially for countries with limited administrative capacity. Smart simplification is therefore not only a competitiveness agenda for current Member States. It is also an enlargement agenda.
EPIC’s contribution highlighted the importance of measuring readiness in a more structured and transparent way. Through the EU Enlargement Observatory and the Integration Readiness Index, EPIC is developing tools to assess how prepared candidate countries are for integration, using clear benchmarks and comparative evidence. Croatia’s accession experience provides an important reference point for understanding what real readiness looks like in practice.
The discussion in Sofia also underlined the role of market integration in unlocking growth across Europe. For the Western Balkans and other candidate countries, access to the Single Market is not simply a final reward at the end of the accession process. It is part of the transformation itself: a way to increase investment, connect firms to European value chains, and strengthen administrative and economic convergence.
EPIC’s message was clear: enlargement will succeed only if Europe combines geopolitical ambition with regulatory realism. A larger Europe must also be a more integrated, more competitive, and more governable Europe.
