Since the early 2010s, both Russia and Turkey have challenged the European order centred on the EU and NATO. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the most recent episode in its bid to assert hegemony over the western regions of the former USSR. Meanwhile, Turkey has transformed from a pivotal NATO member and EU accession candidate into an autonomous foreign policy actor, maintaining a balancing position between the West and Russia.
This talk compares these two parallel challenges and examines their implications for European order, with a particular focus on EU enlargement towards the Western Balkans and Eastern Europe. It argues that Europe (the EU and the UK) retains the capacity to counter Moscow and co-opt Ankara. At the same time, regional rivalries create room for manoeuvre for smaller actors such as Hungary, Serbia, and Azerbaijan, whose elites leverage ties to Russia and Turkey to strengthen their domestic and international positions. This ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy has, in turn, enabled autocratisation in these countries. Alongside intra-EU obstacles such as the rise of populism, the authoritarian drift on the Union’s periphery further dims the prospects for enlargement. The more likely scenario, for both the Western Balkans and countries like Ukraine and Moldova, is a process of staged or partial integration.