In the light of the 20thanniversary EU-Western Balkans Summit of 21 June 2003 in Thessaloniki and the ‘Thessaloniki declaration’ Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group is organising the official launch and presentation of the latest policy brief “Keeping the Thessaloniki promise: How to make Enlargement work for all 20 years later? In the European Parliament on June 29thand in cooperation with the Enlargement, Western Europe and Northern Cooperation Unit of the Directorate General for External Policies of the Union of the European Parliament (DG EXPO).
“The future of the Western Balkans is in the European Union”: this commitment to the “European future” of the Western Balkans was first included in the Thessaloniki declaration in June 2003. Since then, only two countries that emerged from the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia and Croatia, managed to become EU Member States. The remaining ‘Western Balkan Six’ are not even remotely close to EU membership. Moreover, plenty of bilateral issues and problems stemming from the region’s turbulent past, which enlargement was supposed to help resolve, remain open in the absence of any genuine attempt at reconciliation. Overall, the situation is deeply disappointing and compounded by a huge democratic deficit and lack of EU integration reforms.
This new BiEPAG’s policy brief explores how enlargement can still work, in particular in the new geopolitical context following Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the granting of candidate country status to Ukraine and Moldova in June 2022.
The two authors of the brief, Milica Delević, Director of Governance and Political Affairs at the EBRD, and Jovana Marović, former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of European Affairs of the Government of Montenegro, will briefly address the main issues and findings at the event in the European Parliament, which will be moderated by Florian Bieber, Professor of Southeast European History and Politics at the University of Graz and BiEPAG Coordinator.
The policy brief is available at the following link