European Integration and the Western Balkans – What Now?

Is there a real perspective for the full integration of the Western Balkans Six in the European Union, or is the accession process already dead? “Something is rotten in the state of the European integration of the Western Balkans” is not just a poetic way to describe the state of affairs regarding full accession, but a reality. The European Union, and previously the European Economic Community, was quite efficient in previous cycles of European enlargement. Virtually all the accession processes were completed within the mandate of a single European Commission once the negotiation processes had been started with the respective countries. Furthermore, in the pre-accession period the European Union invested heavily in the removal of the “non-acquis political criteria,” which were usually linked to the democratic insufficiencies of the candidate countries. The only notable exceptions to the ‘rule of a single European Commission’ are the Turkish enlargement and the Western Balkans Six (WB6) accession process. Given the fact that most of the WB6 countries already have the necessary legal framework in place for cooperation with the EU and that the single market is by far the largest trading partner of the region, the only logical conclusion is that there is no political will for further enlargement of the European Union, and so the accession process has ground to a halt.