Today marks the 20th anniversary of the European Union – Western Balkans summit held in Thessaloniki on June 21, 2003. The Thessaloniki Summit is one of the most significant events in the context of the European integration of the countries of the region.
On June 21, 2003, the leaders of the European Union and its member states, as well as the acceding and candidate countries at the time, together with the leaders of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, adopted the Declaration, which for the first time unequivocally confirmed the European perspective for all Western Balkan countries.
A sentence from the Declaration – “The future of the Balkans is within the European Union”, marked the Thessaloniki Summit in 2003. A day earlier, on June 20, the European Council, at the initiative of Greece, also approved the Thessaloniki Agenda for the Western Balkans.
The European Union’s 2003 Thessaloniki promise that the former Yugoslav republics and Albania have a European perspective is the first such expression of the EU’s unequivocal support for future integration and full membership of these states in the Union. It came at a time when all of them had already entered the Stabilization and Association Process (SAP), an initiative of the European Union launched in 1999, which established the first legal and political ties between the region and the EU.
At the EU summit in Santa Maria da Feira in 2000, it was confirmed that all participants in the Process are potential candidates for membership. A few months later, at the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Zagreb (the first of its kind), which was finally attended by the President of the FRY, the countries of the region were invited to join the EU. At the Thessaloniki summit, however, an extremely important step forward was taken, signalling the readiness of the EU to guarantee the European perspective for the region, giving a stronger initial impetus to the implementation of the necessary reforms.
One of the messages from the summit in June 2003 was the introduction of the criterion of progress based on individual merit, which means that from then until today, the progress of each country in the region towards the EU depends on its own achievements in meeting the Copenhagen criteria, declared symbolically on the same day a decade earlier – in 1993.
However, today, 20 years later, the (European) perspective of the countries of the Western Balkans is not so bright. Progress towards the European Union based on countries’ own merits has been slowed down or stopped, while only Croatia, from the participants of the Thessaloniki Summit, became a member of the European Union – in 2013.
Serbia and Montenegro have been negotiating EU membership for 9, or more accurately 11 years, without a realistic time frame for the completion of the negotiation process. Negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania officially began only in July 2022, with numerous obstacles standing in the way of further progress. Bosnia and Herzegovina received candidate status only last year, while Kosovo, which embarked on its own European path after declaring independence in 2008, recently applied for membership.