SARAJEVO – The perception of the European Union is no longer as clear as it was ten years ago in the Western Balkans and it is harder to mobilize around. There has been an improvement in the enlargement policy since the start of the war in Ukraine, but the candidates from the Western Balkans still have a higher level of scepticism towards it than the Eastern candidates, says Lura Pollozhani, Researcher at the University of Graz and a member of BiEPAG.
Speaking for European Western Balkans on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG), which was marked last week in Sarajevo, Pollozhani said that in the last ten years, the way that the EU is perceived in the region is much more confusing than it used to be.
“There is no longer this clear, linear, positive connection. And I am not saying there is a negative one either, but it is more diverse and confusing and it is not easy to mobilize around. Because if you do not know what something represents anymore or how tangible it is, it gets harder to tell a story that people can get behind. And I think that this is where we are at now, which is different from how it was in 2014 for instance, whereby, being from North Macedonia, there were a lot of protests, and it was very clear for protesters, and this perception might have been right or wrong, what the EU represented to them. And I think today that clarity is no longer there”, Pollozhani says.
She adds that the EU has to be very clear about whether it actually does want the Western Balkans and although narratively this is the case, she doesn’t think that is the perception among the citizens of the Western Balkans anymore.
“So in that sense, what needs to be done is to have a very clear path towards accession, and have clear communication as to what the EU’s plans are in the region. But also I think we need more visionary leaders in the Western Balkans who are actually fully committed to the European path, and I don’t think that is the case for most countries at the moment”, Pollozhani believes.
Speaking about the state of the enlargement after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Pollozhani assesses that there has been improvement, but that there is still a difference of perception between the Western Balkans and the Eastern candidates.
“If we put activists, thinkers and academics from the Western Balkans in the same room with colleagues from the Eastern Partnership, the mood is very different. Even though we had a little jumpstart, this is a person who has been lying in a sickbed for ages and now you have a person who just came to a hospital recently and they are optimistic about their recovery. And there is this other patient who has been there for ages and who says ‘in this hospital, you are not getting any better'”, she says.
She adds, however, that this also creates tension because the countries from the Eastern Partnership are sacrificing a lot, including their lives, for European ideals.
“So telling them that it is not going to happen also poses a moral and ethical dilemma of whether we should do this. There is this line of scepticism and critique of the whole process, which we are still learning to navigate, which if anything has introduced more tension to the process, which could be a good thing because tension sometimes leads to innovation”, Pollozhani says.
What can the “ordinary” citizens of the Western Balkans do in this context to bring their countries closer to the EU? Pollozhani believes they can stay engaged, and this does not necessarily mean being engaged in some EU movement, but staying engaged in the criticism of their own government and staying engaged in making their societies better.
“I think the best example would be feminist actors in the region, who in particular have been very loud against against very patriarchal and very violent structure of these societies. We see femicides, we see lots of domestic violence in these countries and we see that feminist activists have been consistent in battling that. So they are perhaps the sole consistent activists in the region in the past decade”, Lura Pollozhani concludes.