Addressing the EU’s Credibility Gap in the Western Balkans

When the von der Leyen Commission began its mandate in 2019, it promised to be a “geopolitical Commission”. While Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has become the most high-profile test of that pledge, arguably a still more informative example concerns the EU’s posture in the Western Balkans.

After all, the EU was never envisioned to be a war-fighting organization, so some of the underwhelming aspects of Brussels’ reaction to Russia’s aggression can be side-stepped focusing on this more robust posture of NATO to the same conflict. But since the 2003 Thessaloniki Summit, the Western Balkans were supposed to be the EU’s “backyard,” where the bloc’s “transformative power” could realize structural reforms, with an eye towards securing eventual membership for all regional polities.

That has, obviously, not happened. And far from the war in Ukraine having crystallized the priorities of the EU in the Western Balkans, it has further exposed the myopia of the prevailing policy direction. One which is dominated by the unilateral and illiberal agendas of individual member states, in particular Hungary and Croatia, and wherein a commitment to confront militant authoritarian elements in the region itself is almost wholly absent.

Budapest has provided tens of millions of Euros to Dodik’s regime, despite his increasingly aggressive and militant threats to the Bosnia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. In July 2023, for instance, the RS entity assembly – dominated by Dodik’s long ruling SNSD (Savez nezavisnih socijaldemokrata, or Alliance of Independent Social Democrats) and its allies – passed a resolution, claiming that decisions by the country’s Constitutional Court would no longer apply within the entity.

 As of writing, there is not even the faintest hope for North Macedonia to resume its European path owing to the hardline sectarian views in Sofia.

From the Western Balkan perspective, the EU enlargement process has largely been a bust; a series of false promises, repeatedly betrayed, and often in the most glaring fashion. This may be of little concern to leaders in Western Europe, who evidently continue to view the region as peripheral – in every conceivable sense of the term – but their provincialism belies the profound limitations of the existing EU framework.

Brussels and the capitals ignored for years growing illiberal, sectarian fervor in countries like Croatia, Hungary, and Bulgaria because their primarily concerns appeared limited to their respective machinations in the Western Balkans. But after February 2022, it became increasingly obvious that the same actors were also willing to slow-walk, compromise, and/or condition support to what was presented by most Western leaders as the defining struggle of our time, Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression, in order to serve their own narrow agendas. 

As long as this set of circumstances prevails, it is difficult to see progress in the EU’s regional aspirations or posture. In other words, the EU cannot be a functional or convincing multilateral organization, it cannot meaningfully advance its core ideological and political principles, those upon which it was founded, unless it develops the mechanisms to circumvent the spoilers within its own midst. This matters both in the technical but also the broader political sense. 

In the first case, it is imperative that the EU moves decisively towards a qualified majority model for dealing with its foreign and enlargement policies, especially with respect to the Western Balkans. Already, a group of nine-member states, which includes heavyweights Germany and France, has begun pushing for the same but it is vital that the matter be recognized as existential to the legitimacy of the EU as a foreign policy actor.

So long as states like Croatia, Hungary, and Bulgaria can completely derail the priorities of a political union of half a billion European citizens, the EU will be no more than a geopolitical imp. That is especially the case with respect to glaring inadequacies such as the Hungarian veto over EU sanctions against secessionist Dodik, but also Bulgaria’s malign blockade of North Macedonia. 

It is imperative that the EU moves decisively towards a qualified majority model for dealing with its foreign and enlargement policies, especially with respect to the Western Balkans.

In the second case, the change required is more comprehensive and normative. As improbable and perhaps even dangerous as it might seem to some EU champions, it is time for the bloc to seriously reflect on its own inadequacies, and to pivot on these with respect to its Western Balkans policy. Namely, the EU is no longer able to credibly “preach” to the Western Balkans about even the most basic political principles. Berlin, for example, may want to emphasize the significance of rule of law reforms but such innovations ring hollow when it is ensconced in the same political bloc as Hungary or Poland.

France may wish to stress the necessity of dialogue and negotiation as part of the accession process but then we must recall that divided and half-occupied Cyprus is a member state. The Netherlands may champion the values of liberal democracy, but it too is in a bloc with Croatia that promotes vulgar, ethno-sectarian collectivism, utterly at odds with the European Convention on Human Rights.