Just quickly become a member of the EU? It’s impossible! Since 1993, the Copenhagen criteria have been subject to strict conditions for accession. Despite these strict requirements, 16 Member States have joined since then and the attractiveness of the EU remains unabated — despite the withdrawal of the British. It is often a “generational task”, but the effort pays off: Lasting peace, a world-wide unique stability in a system of structured, close cooperation of formerly hostile states to jointly achieve major goals in a globalised world, access to the world’s largest contiguous internal market — all these are promises of membership of the EU. Further accessions will therefore follow. In our webtalk series “On the way to Europe”, we gradually want to take a closer look at the candidate countries. Both the official candidate countries and the potential applicants in the future play a role. In particular, we want to highlight countries of the “Eastern Partnership” which have not yet submitted an official application for membership. Experts from academia, politics and business provide an insight into the country’s perspective and approaches to accession from today’s perspective and seek answers to the question of where it is in terms of pre-accession to the European Union. We want not only to shed light on the achievement of the “technical barriers”, but also to understand the attitudes of government and citizens. In the sixth episode, we turn to Albania. Once Europe’s poorest country, Albania has made significant progress and has been an official candidate of the European Union since 2014. Nevertheless, it is one of the countries that still have a long way to go and face some challenges in the context of the enlargement of the Western Balkans. Albania is fighting, among other things, with high unemployment, low economic productivity and corruption. Despite these difficulties, a political agreement was reached in March 2020 on the opening of accession negotiations with Albania. Since then, however, the country is still waiting for negotiations to begin. With Renata Alt, member of the Bundestag for the Free Democrats, and Sebastian Schäffer, Managing Director of the “Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe” in Vienna, we gain an overview of Albania’s European perspective and the current state of negotiations. Discuss with us!