free trade

As Brussels pushes ahead with a new wave of enlargement, the numbers behind Europe’s trade with its candidate countries reveal a story of dependence, asymmetry, but also a large, untapped potential.

The official EU candidates are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine. Kosovo is treated as a potential candidate.

Together, they cover a diverse sweep of geography from long Adriatic coastlines to lush forests and some of Europe’s most productive farmland — also including some of Europe’s youngest populations.

But while trade flows between the bloc and future members are booming, the relationship remains unequal, with more EU-produced goods finding a market than those stemming from potential member states.

A relationship measured in billions

According to the European Commission’s 2025 Western Balkans trade factsheet, total trade in goods between the EU and the six Western Balkan partners reached €83.6 billion in 2024, up 28.6% since 2021.

Exports from the EU to the region stood at €49.06bn, while imports from the Western Balkans came to €34.52bn, leaving Brussels with a €14.54bn trade surplus.

The EU’s dominance as a market is overwhelming. It accounts for around 62% of all Western Balkan trade, whereas the region represents barely 1.7% of the EU’s external trade.

For Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania, between two-thirds and three-quarters of all exports go to EU countries.

“All (candidate) countries, with the curious exception of North Macedonia, have persistent trade deficits with the EU, meaning they import more from the EU than they export there,” explained Branimir Jovanović, an expert with The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (WIIW).

“These are economies with small productive sectors. They do not produce enough of what they need, so they have to import, and they also do not produce enough to export,” Jovanović continued.

Over the past decade, North Macedonia has become a production base for components that go straight into EU industry that qualify for preferential access to the EU market under the Stabilisation and Association framework (SAA).

The result is that North Macedonia can sell a relatively high share of what it makes directly into the EU without being blocked by technical standards.

This is very different from, say, Albania, which leans more on raw materials and low-value textiles, or Montenegro, which is tourism-heavy and import-dependent in goods.

It is also different from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, which still import a lot of higher-value machinery from the EU and then export a more mixed, lower-value basket back.

Ukraine and Moldova import high-value EU machinery, vehicles and industrial equipment, while exporting mainly lower-margin goods. In essence, they supply raw materials and basic products, and the EU supplies the technology to produce them.

Barriers to trade

The Western Balkans trade with the EU under SAAs, which gradually remove tariffs and align national laws with EU rules as part of the formal accession process. By contrast, Ukraine and Moldova operate under Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas (DCFTAs), broader deals that open large parts of the EU single market in exchange for adopting much of the EU’s regulatory framework.

In essence, SAAs are a pathway to membership, while DCFTAs offer deep EU market integration without full membership. This distinction has, however, become blurred — with Brussels indicating that it believes in full membership for Ukraine and Moldova after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Countries exporting to the EU face many barriers aside from tariffs. Economists call these technical barriers to trade, such as phytosanitary standards,” Jovanović explained.

So even if they produce something that there is a demand for in the EU, it never reaches those markets because these companies might not have the necessary certificates.

“So, although unemployment has decreased, there is no real progress in development. There is also a real risk of a middle-income trap, in the sense that these economies remain assembly-line economies, with low wages and limited technological development and innovation.”

The same debate now extends to Ukraine, which formally opened EU accession talks in 2024. Despite the war, trade between the EU and Ukraine has surged. Eurostat data shows the bloc exported €42.8bn worth of goods to Ukraine in 2024 and imported €24.5bn, yielding a €18.3bn surplus for the EU.

The composition of that trade has shifted dramatically since the Russian invasion. Agricultural commodities still dominate Ukrainian exports such but the EU has become its conduit for reconstruction materials and machinery.

Neighbouring Moldova, another candidate country since 2023, shows similar patterns. The EU is Moldova’s biggest trading partner, accounting for 54% of its total trade in goods in 2024. Some 65.6% of Moldovan exports head to the EU.

Trade turnover reached about €7.5bn last year, with EU exports to Moldova amounting to €5.1bn and imports to €2.4bn.

EU standards, a distant dream?

The Western Balkans have made solid progress since the early 2000s, but full convergence with the European Union remains a distant goal, warned the OECD’s Economic Convergence Scoreboard for 2025.

The six economies have more than doubled their output in two decades — yet the region still only reaches about 40% of the EU average. At current growth rates, full convergence won’t arrive until 2074.

The region’s output per person (in purchasing-power parity terms) has more than doubled in 20 years, showing real improvement in productivity, investment, and living standards.

That means the Western Balkans are closing the gap, but painfully slowly, and the strong growth rates are offset by the much higher productivity and capital stock inside the EU.

Growth, on its own, is not enough for convergence. The Western Balkans need qualitatively different growth which is driven by innovation, skills, and higher-value industries.

Infrastructure and productivity are the region’s weakest links.

According to the OECD report: “The insufficient quality and coverage of core public transport infrastructure can be a significant obstacle to higher economic growth…as inadequate transport networks can severely constrain the connectivity of producers and consumers to global and regional markets.”

With regard to Ukraine, its economy has adapted after a historic shock, but the damage is staggering. Much of the population has been displaced and large swathes of infrastructure have been destroyed.

Output fell –28.8% in 2022 and rebounded +5.5% in 2023. Public finances are being stretched to the limit by defence needs, hindering convergence with EU member states.

Foreign investment: Friend or foe?

Foreign direct investment (FDI) brings factories and jobs to candidate countries, as well as building stronger links with existing EU member states. Even so, Jovanović argued that this has not led to “structural transformation” in the candidate nations.

The pattern is visible, for example, in Serbia — where car plants are boosting employment but the country is still importing high-tech machinery.

When FDI concentrates in lower-value stages of production and local supplier bases remain thin, wage gains are limited and more value is captured abroad.

“There is a duality in how FDI is perceived: politicians still see it as the key — sometimes even the only way — to develop the economy, while people are increasingly seeing it as a vicious circle,” said Jovanović.

“Hence, a change in the economic model is long overdue — with a more selective approach towards FDI, focusing on high-quality and high-tech investment and a greater focus on domestic companies through industrial and innovation policies,” Jovanović added.

The argument is clear: while FDI raises employment and links these economies to EU markets, it becomes transformative only when it upgrades the local production base.

Otherwise, candidate countries risk remaining an assembly platform rather than a full partner in Europe’s value chains.

A test of Europe’s promise

In the end, the numbers tell both a success story and a warning. They show integration without transformation: Exports are up, factories are open, but productivity and infrastructure still lag.

The next phase will need to hinge on quality, not just quantity, say experts. This means selective FDI that upgrades supply chains, targeted single-market access tied to reforms, and faster investment in skills, energy, and transport.

If Brussels and the candidates can shift from assembly to innovation, the gap can narrow within a generation. If not, the candidate countries risk remaining a dependable workshop rather than a prosperous partner.

In the days since Charlie Kirk’s killing, conservatives have embraced a phenomenon they previously called toxic: cancel culture.

The impulse to cancel some voices this past week is understandable: Celebrating murder is cruel. It’s gross. It’s wrong. But the irony is impossible to miss: Conservatives, who long treated cancel culture as an affront to the 1st Amendment spirit of open discourse, are now calling for people to lose their jobs and their livelihoods, all because of something stupid they said on the internet.

This is the same issue that drove numerous stand-up comedians, young men, podcasters and Silicon Valley tech bros into the arms of Donald Trump in 2024. But now, in an amazing turn of events, conservatives are now aping the progressive scolds and speech cops, only with red hats.

Actually, their version is worse. The left’s “accountability culture” mob might have been overbearing, but their agenda was (with a few notable exceptions) largely driven by hall monitors. Today’s “woke right” is executing things in a more overt, efficient and official manner — which for the record means it can violate not just the spirit of the 1st Amendment but the actual, you know … 1st Amendment.

As a case in point, JD Vance, the vice president of the United States of America, recently told Kirk’s radio audience: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.”

Which raises the question, what if their employer is the government? That would be awkward. But no problem! Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly telling staff to track down soldiers guilty of wrongspeak. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) is trying to get teachers terminated, tweeting: “We don’t fund hate. We fire it” — which feels like the sort of slogan Mao might have had printed on a T-shirt.

And speaking of printers, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi has warned that the government can “prosecute” any professional printer who refuses to “print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil.” She also pledged to “absolutely target” anyone who targets anyone with “hate speech.”

Not long ago, progressives insisted bakers must bake cakes for gay weddings, and now a U.S. attorney general from a Republican administration is insisting that printers must print images for vigils. Funny how the tables turn.

Then, there’s the so-called Charlie Kirk Data Foundation, which claims to have a searchable list of tens of thousands of people who posted mean tweets after Kirk’s death. Collectively, this purge campaign seems to be working. A lot of scalps have already been claimed, including those of prominent pundits and late night host Jimmy Kimmel (who was suspended after making remarks about the motives of Kirk’s killer).

But — let’s be clear — opposition to cancel culture is merely the latest principle that Trump-era Republicans have conveniently abandoned. Indeed, almost every tenet that conservatives held dear a decade ago has been reversed.

And people are starting to notice. Oregon state Rep. Cyrus Javadi recently switched parties, citing the GOP’s abandonment of principles like “limited government, fiscal responsibility, free speech, free trade, and, above all, the rule of law.”

He has a point. Trump’s America now owns a chunk of U.S. chipmaker Intel (so much for small government), spends like a drunken sailor, slaps tariffs on everything that moves (bye-bye, free trade) and ignores laws he doesn’t like — most recently, the TikTok sell-off mandate that was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, which Trump decided to treat like a menu item he didn’t order — until he found a suitable buyer.

But it’s not just normie Republicans who are worried about Trump diverting from the Reagan-Bush playbook.

Comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon recently observed that the Trump agenda looks suspiciously like the dystopia that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones used to warn us about between colloidal silver ads: “Military in the street, the FEMA camp, the tech company that monitors everything, the surveillance. This is all of that.”

So why is this happening? Why the contortions? I’m reminded of an old story Rush Limbaugh used to tell about the late actor Ron Silver.

As the story goes, Silver went to Bill Clinton’s first inauguration as a bleeding-heart liberal and was horrified by the military flyover. And then he realized, “Those are our planes now.”

That’s where conservatives are when it comes to cancel culture. They’ve finally realized that this is their cancel culture now.

And maybe that’s the grubby little secret about politics in the Trump era. Almost nobody cares about values or morals — or “principles” — anymore. Free speech, limited government, fiscal restraint — these are all rules for thee, but not for me.

Cancel culture wasn’t rejected, it was just co-opted. So go ahead. Drop a dime. See something, say something. Big Brother is watching.

Irony, meet guillotine.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”