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Leonid Litra and Ivane Chkhikvadze presented the draft analytical paper “Membership perspective for Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine: Impossible, Forgotten or Hidden?” within the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum in Kyiv, on November 20, 2015.“The result of the reforms in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine could be described as insufficient for sustainable change and Europeanization, but enough for an officially recognized EU membership perspective. Therefore, the three associated countries need to prepare the bid for EU membership by setting up a special task-force that would prepare the application and would study the Balkan experience”, – said Leonid Litra, presenting the draft of his research.

As the authors noted, this paper is not questioning the right of the three countries to apply for the EU. Instead their attempt is to find out the conditions for officially recognized membership perspective for Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia.

In the draft analytical paper, authors assume that the problems with membership exist on both sides. While it is difficult to influence the issues in EU MS, it is however, mandatory to fix issues in AA countries. Creation of task force in each state dealing with problems that prevents them from applying to membership perspectives. In each of the country the task force will be dealing with mapping the out how should the EU membership bid be planned, what would be the narrative and how to counter the arguments of the euro-sceptics, but certainly if no progress on reforms will be done, then it is unlikely that the building narrative would be positive.

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“The result of the reforms in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine could be described as insufficient for sustainable change and Europeanization, but enough for an officially recognized EU membership perspective. Therefore, the three associated countries need to prepare the bid for EU membership by setting up a special task-force that would prepare the application and would study the Balkan experience”, – said Leonid Litra, presenting the draft of his research.

To download the paper click here.
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“This paper is about European perspective for the best performing countries of eastern partnership – Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. At this paper we are stressing several issues – wether the perspective was impossible or it was forgotten or it was hidden. The main idea is that however good the implementation of the EU agreement in these countries is there won’t be any kind of clear offer for the european perspective and than membership for them”, – said Ivane Chkhikvadze, answering the question about the draft policy brief.
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The draft analytical paper was presented by Leonid Litra, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of World Policy, and Ivane Chkhikvadze, Open Society Foundation (Georgia) within “New European Policy: Filling the Awareness Gap” project supported by “Ukraine National Initiatives to Enhance Reforms” (UNITER) project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by the Pact in Ukraine.