Western Balkans on its way to the EU – status quo regardless of the refugee crisis

New policy paper by Michal Vít analyses current situation in the Western Balkans countries from the perspective of ongoing convergence process of these countries and the EU.

• This text describes contemporary political and societal context of the Western Balkan region (WB) from the perspective of the EU enlargement. It strives to present evidence of the links between the slowly declining interest in this region from the EU’s point of view and prevalence of the declared integrational commitment over its actual execution. Within this framework is placed the matter of the migrant crisis. Current state of things denotes how it failed to provide a much needed momentum for the Europe-wide problem solving, but at the same time served as a tool to achieve goals with certain level of blackmail potential, different from solving the migrant crisis itself. The importance of the EU-WB relations and lack of understanding regarding its importance to the EU is also discussed.
• The migrant crisis brings the attention of the world’s media as well as renowned experts to the WB countries. Part of this attention is being focused on issues concerned with the faith of these countries in regard to the EU and prospects of potential WB countries inclusion to the EU enlargement process. Many experts thus make great effort to find the proper answer to the migrant crisis manifesting itself on the so called Balkan route and integration of concerned countries to the EU. With a little exaggeration it is correct to say that present-day attention is not helpful to neither of the two sides involved – the EU and the particular WB countries. It becomes clear, that current form of integrational process is unwanted on both sides – the EU does not see this question as a priority and WB countries do not want to lose their sovereign political and economic power.

You can download the publication through PDF on the right.

Michal Vít
Research Fellow (until September 2018)

Topics: Political parties, National identity, V4