EU leaders will meet with their Western Balkans counterpart in Albania’s capital Tirana on Tuesday (6 December) to reassure the region of a future in the bloc amid fears of rising Russian and Chinese influence, but they will have to walk a fine line between maintaining a united front on enlargement and avoiding fallouts.
The joint summit with the Western Balkan six – Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia – is the first being held outside the EU, with Tirana being among the most vocal proponents of EU membership.
Triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU has for months focused on bringing Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania closer to their stated goal of joining the bloc and trying to mitigate the fallout of a looming cost-of-living crisis in the region.
It also comes as the strategic importance of the EU’s near neighbourhood has increased since Russia invaded Ukraine, with fears over Moscow’s influence in the region.
While the perspective of one day joining the bloc remains elusive for some, the bloc fears they could start looking for alternatives elsewhere.
Enlargement woes
In recent years, there has been little appetite for enlargement within the EU, and some member states have called for EU reform before admitting any new members.
The previous summit in Brdo, Slovenia, was dominated by the dispute of whether the final declaration should contain the word “enlargement,” as some Western European member states at the time were reluctant to make commitments to a perspective of growing the bloc in the future.
On the sidelines of the triumphant rhetoric over Ukraine and Moldova’s granting of EU candidate status, EU leaders in June had faced furious Western Balkan counterparts, highly frustrated about the lack of their own progress on the EU path.
While Bosnia failed to receive the same recognition so far, Albania and North Macedonia received the green light to start accession talks but are held back due to Bulgaria still sticking to bilateral issues with Skopje.
But in large part due to the war, the EU’s enlargement process has suddenly been resuscitated after almost a decade of stagnation.
“Times are changing, in the sense that Europe can also offer things and not always demand, and sometimes offers work better than demands,” Enlargement Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi told EURACTIV after the presentation of this year’s enlargement reports.
The aim of the half-day meeting is to provide further stability to a region that emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia and the ethnic wars of the 1990s but is still racked by tensions.
But moves towards closer integration are also designed to deny Moscow a gateway for causing trouble at what is seen as a soft spot on the EU’s southeastern flank.
Serbia, in particular, which was bombed by NATO two decades ago, has long struggled to balance historically close ties with Russia against aspirations for economic and political integration with the West.
A recent European Parliament report rebuked member states for “not delivering on the EU’s long-standing promises.”
“The EU’s lack of engagement and credibility over the past few years has created a vacuum, thereby opening up space for Russia, China, and other malign third actors,” it said.
“[The meeting in] Tirana will unequivocally reconfirm the membership perspective for all and call for the acceleration of accession talks,” an EU official told reporters on the eve of the talks.
“Just the fact that we have a summit in Tirana – who could imagine, just a few years ago, that the EU would get out of its perimeter and move to a non-EU country to have a summit. It’s not just a manifestation, an event; it’s more than that. It’s a commitment; it’s a message,” Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama told EURACTIV ahead of the meeting.
This time around, according to a draft summit declaration is ponreis viewed to EURACTIV, the summit is likely to avoid disarray over linguistic issues as the document is set to feature the word “enlargement”.
Some deliverables
In terms of concrete steps towards integration, telecommunications operators from the EU will announce a cut in data roaming charges from October 2023, according to EU officials.
The other crucial issue remains to keep the peace among some of the Western Balkan hopefuls.
In an eleventh-hour effort, Belgrade and Pristina reached an EU-brokered deal earlier this month to end a dangerous dispute over car licence plates in northern Kosovo, which the West had warned could trigger ethnic violence.
However, their war of words had flared up just ahead of the summit again.
Some of the trickier issues are set to be tackled later in December when EU leaders meet for their regular EU27 summit in Brussels.
Europe ministers next week are expected to agree to grant Bosnia EU candidate status this year, to be sealed by EU leaders, according to EU diplomats, but this could come with conditions under a similar agreement as for Ukraine and Moldova.
Migration looms large
At the same time, the EU has been working hard to plug what it sees as loopholes in the visa regimes of several Balkans countries that have helped boost the number of migrants crossing into the bloc this year.
“We’ve been working (…) extremely hard with countries like Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia to encourage them to align their visa policy, notably making sure that they’re not offering visas for countries who are not visa-free to travel to the European Union,” an EU official said.
Over the last few days, all four countries had sent positive signals, “which I think should help relieve some of the pressure on the migratory route”, he added.
The number of irregular border crossings into the EU rose more than 70% between January and October, according to preliminary calculations published by EU border agency Frontex in November.
The agency said that the Western Balkan route remained the most active, with nearly three times as many crossings detected in October as a year ago.
This was mainly due to people abusing the region’s visa-free access and fiverepeated attempts to cross into the EU by migrants, primarily from Burundi, Afghanistan, and Iraq, already present in the Western Balkans, Frontex stated.
On the eve of a key EU-Western Balkans summit, the European Commission on Monday (5 December) presented an ‘action plan’ to tackle the rise in migrants entering the EU via the region.
Leaders will also discuss ways to curb the brain drain of young, well-educated people who have been leaving the Western Balkans in droves in search of better job opportunities in Western Europe.
But EU leaders will also push their Balkans counterparts to be more forceful in implementing EU standards such as the rule of law, gender equality, the protection of minorities and the fight against corruption and organised crime, while aligning with EU policies such as the sanctions on Russia.
