Washington Post: How the EU Betrayed Western Balkans

On the eve of European elections, the American newspaper in an authorial text recalls that in the last 16 years Brussels has promised Western Balkan countries the most vulnerable and unstable region, that the Balkan “future is in the EU”.

Last year, however, Brussels significantly changed its policy and completely annulled the idea of further enlargement.

If the Western Balkans avoid the Euro-Atlantic community, European leaders will have to blame themselves. Completely disappointed by the unfulfilled promise of integration, Balkan countries will soon become desperate, but also dangerous, especially for the EU itself”, writes the paper, which is not too late for the EU to change its course.

According to the newspaper, The EU should formally start negotiations for the membership of northern Macedonia and Albania, and at least grant candidate status for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This will presently stabilise the ship and the following task is to create a long-term sustainable plan for a region that will include not only reliable devotion to liberal-democratic norms and practices, but also major obstacles from such as Russia “, she says.

Simply saying “not” to Western Balkan countries, this could also be assessed as a game of traditional electorate, but this is not a strategy but a delayed crisis.

The WP writes that with the approach of elections for the European Parliament, enlargement has disappeared from the agenda and that no one was interested in other countries that are not members of the EU -- Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, northern Macedonia and Albania.

The promise of a “European perspective” was an integral part of Brussels' strategy for keeping the Western Balkans on the road to political and economic reforms and stopping Russia, China, Turkey ... as political rivals.

It is estimated that this move cannot come at a worse moment, as only in January of this year, Skopje and Athens ended their dispute about three decades over “the name issue”.

Recalling the privilege of integration into membership of former Warsaw Pact countries, it is noted that Western Balkan countries are not the same as Eastern European countries, whose EU membership was precedent.

While Eastern Europe experienced decades of authoritarian regimes, in southeast of the continent was under the rule of monstrous regimes for decades, followed by a series of regional and internal conflicts that led to the loss of about 150,000 people in 1991-2001.

In short, the conclusion was that creating states and promoting democracy in the Western Balkans was sensitive and stable, and what the region took instead was a model of EU accession -- a technically rigorous but politically inefficient programme.