WARSAW – All Western Balkans countries have made important steps towards the European Union over the past couple of years, and the work with them will continue to ensure their progress towards European integration becomes “irreversible”, High Representative Federica Mogherini said in Warsaw this Tueseday on the margins of the Central Europe-Western Balkans ministerial meeting, organised by Poland as the Presidency of the Visegrad 4.
“It is on a daily basis that we work together with each and every of the six countries in the Western Balkans and we have in these two years of my mandate made progress in all and every single one of them,” Mogherini said. “And I believe that this will make the progress and the process towards becoming members of the European Union for each and every one of them irreversible by the end of our mandate which is three years from now.”
Apart from the enlargement process, an issue very high on the agenda at the Warsaw meeting was security. “The meeting today is a good opportunity to discuss together with them and together with some of the EU Member States concrete ways in which we can solve better the problems of our citizens, regardless of them being part or not of the European Union, because some of the problems we are facing today are going beyond borders, as we see very clearly with security,” she added.
Also discussed at the meeting that the High Representative joined upon the invitation of Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski were other challenges both the EU and the Western Balkan countries face as well as the opportunities “in terms of economic development, in terms of job creation, in terms of managing security challenges, countering radicalisation of our youth or managing the refugee flows”, which “show very clearly that we have common agendas that go beyond the enlargement process”.