SARAJEVO – There is renewed talk about the EU enlargement following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and there are also some good signals coming from Brussels, but it remains to be seen whether this dynamic will be sufficient, says Marko Kmezić, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz and a member of BiEPAG.
Kmezić commented for European Western Balkans on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG), which was marked last week in Sarajevo.
Among good signals coming from Brussels, Kmezić points out that the new European Commission will again have a Directorate General exclusively focused on Enlargement.
“I have cautiously higher hopes for the new Enlargement Commissioner than I had for the previous one, because she does not come from a country that has a rule of law and democratic issues internally, so I am expecting to see much more in the upcoming period. Whether this dynamic will be sufficient and whether there will be a new tradeoff regarding stabilocratic practices by means of exchanging support for preventing migration routes, exporting lithium and so on remains to be seen”, Kmezić says.
In this context, he adds, an additional key thing would be bottom-up pressure which should come from the citizens of the region. According to Kmezić, the citizens seem to be mature enough to demonstrate their willingness to support the democratic processes, but at the same time, many are disillusioned with the EU at the moment.
Commenting on the developments between the European Union and the Western Balkans since 2014, when BiEPAG was founded, Kmezić points out that this has been the first time that there has not been an enlargement of the European Union for a full decade, but factually some new relations and new cleavages have emerged.
“Although there is still no enlargement, there is now clarity that in the absence of the fulfilment of the EU’s promise, the EU’s leverage in the region is much lower. All those demands and conditionality do not work anymore, so if there is anything that has changed it is that the EU’s conditionality does not bear fruit anymore. Therefore, expected convergence with regard to democracy has failed”, Kmezić assesses.
He says that there needs to be a “tectonic shift” both on the side of the EU and the Western Balkan governments and understanding that the process needs to be fulfilled.
“Basically, they need to stop pretending and start walking the walk. We need to call a spade a spade and say that the process has been stalled, that more reforms are needed and this needs to be backed up by the fulfilment of the promises by the EU”, Kmezić concludes.