Spajić: Montenegro wants to join the EU for security reasons

Montenegro wants to become a member of the European Union less for traditional "fiscal" reasons and more for security reasons, said Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, reports Brussels-based "Politiko".

“Joining the EU... used to be about... fiscal support for your infrastructure,” Spajić said at Politiko’s “European Pulse” forum in Barcelona. “But that’s not really the case anymore.”

Instead, Montenegro — which officially launched EU accession negotiations in 2012 and is a leading candidate for membership — wants to join the bloc partly because of its status as a “peace project,” he said.

“The key for us, why we want to join the EU, is obviously the common values ​​that we all believe in, and secondly, it’s a single market, it’s half a billion people versus half a million Montenegrins,” Spajić said. “And the third thing is that it’s a peace project, maybe even the last peace project on Earth these days, so that’s the value of the European Union.”

Across Europe, non-EU countries, from Iceland to Moldova, are increasingly expressing interest in joining the bloc for security reasons, not just trade and economic benefits, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and US President Donald Trump's threat to annex Greenland, Politiko reminds.

Montenegro is by far the most advanced candidate country in the accession negotiations, having closed 14 of the 33 negotiation chapters, which are the criteria required for joining the EU. However, some member states are skeptical about adding new members and want to reform the bloc's decision-making process first, the portal adds.

Spajić said that official Podgorica, which has set the ambitious goal of joining the EU by 2028, is "at 80, 90 percent" when it comes to closing the remaining chapters and is "very confident" that it will do so by the end of the current year.

"Some of the things we're doing now, the reforms we're implementing, are absolutely unprecedented," he said.

Spajić believes that by joining the EU, Montenegro would "give hope to the Western Balkans" while "preserving enlargement as a very, very powerful tool of the European Union."