• Although formulated as a response to external challenges, the Eu¬ropean Union’s enlargement and economic security agendas have a transformative potential: they call for wide-ranging reforms that could fundamentally change the EU’s institutional set-up, decision-making processes, budget, and core policy areas.
• Lithuania has an interest in seeing the full and complete implemen¬tation of these agendas. However, the existing official proposals for possible reforms and Lithuania’s position towards them still pose many unanswered questions.
• Implementing these agendas will be a long-term process. The Euro¬pean Commission is still in the early stages of pre-enlargement policy reviews and has only recently initiated the economic security risk as¬sessment process and launched the public consultations on potential ways to expand the EU toolkit. Accordingly, Lithuania will have plenty of opportunities to make its views known and to shape further discus¬sions in the near to medium term.
• In future discussions, Lithuania should develop and present an inte¬grated approach to the enlargement and economic security agendas. The two agendas are mutually complementary: by strengthening the single market, industrial base, and value chains, enlargement will be a key contribution to EU’s economic security. By committing more in¬vestment and joint programmes for friendly markets, the economic se¬curity agenda can further support the candidates’ accession efforts.
• An integrated approach to the two agendas would help move beyond the current and largely unproductive discussions of whether and what reforms are required for enlargement. Instead, as enlargement is itself a contribution to economic security, the EU should set the goal of ensuring long-term economic security as the bench¬mark for the scope and nature of necessary reforms.
• An integrated approach can help refocus the budget debate away from how to dis¬tribute financing across the so-called traditional (agriculture, cohesion) and other programmes to a more fundamental question of budgetary policy objectives and their complementarity.
• Finally, an integrated approach reveals what additional efforts are needed to achieve both enlargement and the economic security objectives. A major obstacle to delivering on either of the two agendas is the livelihood insecurity felt by many European citizens and residents. As this feeling plays an important role in gener¬ating popular resistance to economic integration, the EU needs to take the lead in tackling livelihood security to make enlargement and economic security possible.
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