Thread by @PascalLTH, Recently talk of the conditions for joining the EU has been cropping [...]

Recently talk of the conditions for joining the EU has been cropping up on my timeline. This has relevance for both the UK and possibly an independent Scotland so let's go through what we know for sure in this thread. /1

The Treaty on European Union, Article 49.

This is the mirror to Article 50, which we've all heard plenty about. Article 49 says a few brief things about a state seeking to join the EU. /2

So what are the requirements? First point: must be a European state.

We don't ever really discuss this but it did come up once, when Morrocco applied to join in 1987 and was rejected on the basis it's not a European country.

But not an issue for UK/Scotland /3

Second point: must respect the values in Article 2. Some people might make some comments on this depending on their political views but I believe it's very unlikely UK/Scotland would fail this condition. /4

Third point: The conditions for joining are set by the European Council (the national governments). Art49 isn't specific on this but we do have more info on what these are because they've been defined before.

They are the 1993 Copenhagen Criteria. /5

The first two bullet points are again unlikely to be issues for the UK/Scotland.

The third point is where we start to run into potential problems. What does it mean to take on the obligations of membership? /6

The main thrust of it is that you need to commit to all the existing parts of EU integration (at least those that aren't voluntary anyway). This includes those parts where you could have negotiated an opt-out if you were around at the time but where new joiners can't /7

There are three points that come up here: the euro, Schengen and EU/eurozone debt rules /8

First on joining the euro. The candidate country must politically commit to joining the euro, there's no ambiguity here.

But, a country cannot join the euro and be part of its processes without having joined the EU first. /9

And once you're in, it's near impossible to police whether countries are genuinely making an effort towards meeting the euro criteria and there's nothing you can do to punish them even if you could prove they were deliberately avoiding it. /10

So the UK/Scotland would not need to 'join the euro', they would need to commit to joining the euro at some point. So on this front the difficulty would be explaining this to the public here more than getting it past the EU /11

In practice you need to win the political argument on euro membership either way (or at least make it seem a lot less of a concern). This is the real challenge for public opinion more than any hard requirement to join the euro /12

Second, Schengen. This one is different to the euro. The EU would likely insist that the UK/Scotland has to join from day 1 of EU membership. A transition period is not impossible but it wouldn't be very long. /13

*If* you could leverage an opt-out from this (and it's a big if) it would be thanks to Ireland. The UK and Ireland maintained a joint opt-out of Schengen in order to secure no disruption to their Common Travel Area (e.g. if one joined Schengen but the other didn't) /14

It's not impossible that Ireland could say they still don't want to join Schengen and therefore that the UK/Scotland also shouldn't join. But that very much would be in their hands and would require convincing all the other Member States /15

And third, EU/eurozone debt requirements. I've already covered why the eurozone convergence criteria would not be constraining. But there is still in theory a 3% deficit/60% public debt target that EU states should achieve /16

The trouble is in knowing how much weight these rules will have at the time the UK/Scotland applied for membership. They've been taken more or less seriously at different points. Currently they're suspended and no one would pay them any attention anyway. /17

We don't even know if the rules will exist in their current form a few years from now.

What is perhaps better is to say that you need to show your debt is under control. If your deficit is 3.2%, it's easy to imagine exceptions being made or 'transitional commitments' /18

But if your deficit is 7% then clearly there's going to be a problem. Ditto with public debt. It seems unlikely that you'd actually be asked to massively slash public debt if you can show your annual deficit is low /19

Depending on who you believe this may or may not have an impact on an independent Scotland. I'm not going to get into the post-independence economics, just say that this is the context. /20

Those are the three main points of contention. This is in addition to all EU law (the 'acquis communautaire') which would have to be accepted. The significance of this requirement would depend on how much the UK diverges from EU rules /21

Finally there's one more trump card to all of this: the Member States can say they want to add on basically any other condition they feel like and can insist on vetoing any application as long as their demand isn't met. /22

This has been the fate of North Macedonia. Greece blocked it's application for decades because the two countries disagreed over the use of the name 'Macedonia' (which was finally unblocked by the adoption of North Macedonia) /23

This had nothing to do with EU treaties or EU law but the veto of national governments remains a wild card. France vetoed North Macedonia and Albania recently. North Macedonia is now facing new issues from Bulgaria. /24

There's not much you can do to stop this totally but it does indicate the golden rule of joining the EU: you really want as many friends on the inside as possible. All technicalities and criteria aside, the bottom line is whether the current members want you in or not /25

As such any country with aspirations to join should consider that it is in the process of applying long before it takes any formal steps.

The alliances and friendships you built yesterday are the biggest tool for guaranteeing membership tomorrow /end

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