By allowing Western Balkans democracy to falter for two decades, the EU has trapped itself

Ursula von der Leyen, on the left, and Aleksandar Vučić Photo courtesy of the European Commission

Now, few regional leaders have demonstrated the political will to correct this deterioration, and the EU is losing credibility. Brussels will need to rapidly adjust its approach towards accession to account for the specific domestic factors that are stalling democratic consolidation and sidelining integration in these countries. The longer it waits, the greater the challenge will become.

A policy reversal in Brussels

In alignment with past phases of enlargement, the EU’s initial strategy to integrate the Western Balkans was tailored to each country’s circumstances. The stages of accession depended on each country’s pace of reform, with progress in the accession process resting on the completion of key political and economic reforms in line with a principle known as “conditionality”. This coincided with a period of dramatic democratic consolidation in the region in the late 1990s and early 2000s. To varying degrees, the countries of the Western Balkans successfully built basic electoral processes; formed media regulators; passed decentralization reforms; created strategic documents for working with civil society and fighting corruption; and improved the transparency of courts and integrity of judges.

Yet, overtime, the EU’s policy towards this region has transformed. Prior accession processes proved to be too “hands on” and, ultimately, too expensive to replicate in an increasingly divided, inward-looking and post-financial-crisis Europe. Overtime, the EU applied the principle of conditionality more inconsistently and moved toward a “one size fits all” approach. For example, this was done by pairing the accession processes of Albania and North Macedonia or urging Montenegro to replicate Albania’s judicial vetting despite Montenegrin civil society’s recommended alterations. Practically, this meant that the EU began to de-prioritize democratic reform in the Western Balkans, allowing the status quo to persist under the guise of regional “stability”.

Two decades later, the EU is paying the price for losing its resolve: a regional crisis of democracy. Indices of democracy, such as Freedom House’s Nations in Transit, tell a clear story. The Western Balkan countries have been stuck as “hybrid regimes” – governance systems with mixed features of democracy and autocracy – for years. Yet, it is especially the last five years that have seen democracy in this region not just stagnate but regress.

Nowhere has the EU accession process failed more than in Serbia, whose democracy rapidly declined in 2023 amid a decade of ongoing deterioration. Fraudulent snap elections in December represented the culmination of many worrying trends, including the ruling party’s brazen capture of media and local governance and its smearing and evident surveillance of civil society and the opposition. Alongside the stalling of promised justice reforms and years of state influence over key judicial decisions, these trends point to the consolidation of power in the hands of the president, Aleksandar Vučić, and warn of a country headed closer and closer towards autocracy. Serbia’s decline has reverberated throughout the Western Balkans, contributing in recent years to the reversal of the democratic gains made in these countries in the 2000s.

Back to square one

The supposed frontrunner of Western Balkan enlargement, Montenegro, is emblematic of the “stop and go” struggle for democracy in the rest of the region. Although voters successfully put an end to the single party rule of Milo Đukanović’s Democratic Party of Socialists in 2020, and then voted Đukanović out of the presidency in 2023, Montenegrin democracy has continued to struggle since. The country has been stuck in a protracted constitutional crisis that has marred basic judicial and parliamentary functions and allowed corruption and organized crime to thrive. A new political option and changes to the constitutional order in 2023 brought Montenegro back to square one when it comes to EU-mandated rule of law reforms. At the same time, it also left an inexperienced – and increasingly divided – political party with new obstacles to democracy. 

In North Macedonia, 19 years in the accession process have not led to a different outcome. Following the country’s ousting of strongman Nikola Gruevski in 2017, subsequent cabinets repaired some institutional damage by fighting media capture and shoring up electoral integrity. Yet in the last several years, North Macedonia has struggled to de-politicize the judiciary and corruption remains endemic. Both only worsened in 2023 due to politically motivated changes to the criminal code, one of the few amendments the parliament was able to pass without obstruction from opposition parties like that led by Gruevski, which triumphed in presidential and parliamentary elections in spring 2024.

While Montenegro and North Macedonia have struggled with political instability, Albania has seen the slow and steady consolidation of power by its ruling party following several dubious elections. The first party in recent history to win a third consecutive term in 2021, Edi Rama’s Socialist Party has fostered an environment of virulent polarization and tense competition in parliament rather than one of healthy pluralism and consensus-building. At the same time, conditions for media and civil society have deteriorated. Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Structure, SPAK, is one of the few bright spots for democracy in this region, though its efforts have yet to make a dent in the lower-level corruption increasingly normalized in Albanian society.

The latest newcomer to the EU process, Bosnia and Herzegovina, remains the worst performing democracy in the region. The country’s unique institutional framework has entrenched ethno-nationalist leaders and their corrupt patronage networks; allowed a discriminatory electoral system to prevail; threatened the safety of journalists and activists; and made political institutions from courts to local legislatures almost entirely dysfunctional. Milorad Dodik, the head of the Republika Srpska entity, effectively strong-armed laws against media and civil society into reality in 2023 and has only intensified his threats to secede from the Bosnian state in 2024. Chronic structural challenges, intensified nationalism and renewed security concerns put the future of Bosnian democracy in peril.

Kosovo is the last in line for EU membership, largely due to its protracted territorial dispute with neighbouring Serbia and the fact that several EU states do not recognize the country’s independence. While many Kosovan institutions remain underdeveloped, the country has made progress in guaranteeing the peaceful transfer of power and in the overall stabilization of national governance. This was especially true after the 2021 snap elections brought a reform-oriented government to power. Still, as is true in many of the Western Balkan countries, progress on rule of law and anti-corruption reforms have been intermittent and slow moving. Some fear that the current government may intensify pressure against critical members of the media and civil society.  

Misunderstandings and missed opportunities

The EU’s neglect of institutional reform over the last two decades has left all the Western Balkan countries at the same endpoint of democratic recession and EU divergence. Yet, the last few years have revealed fundamental differences in these countries’ democratic trajectories. Not only has the EU de-prioritized possible democratic reform, it has also misunderstood these different trajectories and, therefore, these countries’ different prospects for future integration. 

The EU’s Serbia policy has been most heavily criticized, given the country’s steep descent towards autocracy; its partnerships with illiberal governments across Eurasia; and efforts to destabilize its neighbours. Despite all this, the EU has continued to side with the United States in treating Serbia as a genuine partner in building regional democracy and security. This has not only shaken the EU’s credibility but has had negative secondary impacts across the Western Balkans, including by lowering standards for the protection of human rights; sowing government disregard for international norms and actors; and allowing malign influence from Russia to proliferate across the continent.

The primary challenge to democracy for most of the Western Balkan countries has been to shrug off entrenched political elites and their long-term effects on would-be democratic institutions. Cycles of political instability, executive aggrandizement, and low-capacity judiciaries and anti-corruption bodies hang over democracy in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and North Macedonia, among others. In many of these cases, the EU has failed to spot “breakthrough elections”, missing the chance to incentivize or support new reformist governments in their efforts at democratic consolidation.

Take North Macedonia for example, where the EU and US supported citizens in removing Gruevski from power in 2017. In the years since, the EU did not adequately push for needed rule of law reforms in the country, allowing historical identity disputes with Greece and Bulgaria to take precedent and stall North Macedonia’s EU process instead. This, in part, allowed Gruevski’s VMRO-DPMNE party to block policymaking in parliament; change the criminal code to insulate its members from taking legal accountability for past abuses of office; and make a successful comeback in the consequential 2024 elections. Given VMRO-DPMNE’s history and stated intentions to undermine the EU-brokered deal with Bulgaria, few predict that the party will steer the country towards democracy or the EU in the coming years.

The good news is that the window for meaningful democratic reform has not closed in all the countries. In Kosovo there is a real opportunity for democratic consolidation. Albin Kurti’s government has shown that there is political will for institutional reform. And, over the last several years, we have seen progress in overhauling the judicial sector and providing stable governance despite the worsening security situation on the border with Serbia. The EU would do well to recognize this political will and institutional progress by working with Kosovo to resolve disputes with Serbia and fully recognizing the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, thereby re-invigorating the country’s accession process. The recent stalling of Kosovo’s Council of Europe membership by the so-called “quint” formation of the US, UK, France, Germany, and Italy amidst Serbian pressure represents a significant step backward in this regard.

What watchers of this region have learned from the last 20 years, but especially the last several years, is that democracy in the countries of the Western Balkans is headed in disparate directions. These different democratic trajectories mean that each country has distinctly different prospects for EU enlargement. The EU, for its part, has not only failed to understand these nuances but it has also failed to make democracy in this region a real strategic priority for many years – to the overall detriment of both democratization and integration. The EU’s new Growth Plan for the Western Balkans may be the policy reset this region needs, but understanding these domestic nuances must be the basis of a new approach if the EU wants enlargement to be successful in bringing meaningful institutional reform to this region.

2024: a critical juncture 

Many had hoped that Russia’s full-scale invasion and the rightful moves to fast-track Ukraine’s EU membership in its wake would catalyze a wider wave of European enlargement for the Western Balkans. However, this optimism has been misplaced. Democracy in this region has mainly regressed since February 2022, and Western Balkan political institutions have reacted in a negative manner to the seismic geopolitical shifts underway in the broader Europe and Eurasia regions. Rather than recommitting to institutional reform in the region, the EU has opted to prop up a risky status quo in the Western Balkans. Its inattentiveness to the region will only become riskier, as the Western Balkan countries will soon be forced to decide between sinking closer and closer into autocracy, or joining European democracies in shoring up political institutions in the context of Russia’s authoritarian aggression.

As tense and precarious as the current moment may be, it poses an opportunity for the EU to revitalize its transformative power. To do so, the EU will have to craft a shrewd and realistic policy for this region that accounts for the main driver of non-existent integration – poor democratic governance – and openly recognizes specific regional leaders’ role in it. In short, the EU will have to finally put democracy at the centre of its enlargement strategy for the Western Balkans. Failure to do so will make building democracy in this region – and in other aspiring members like Ukraine and Moldova – costlier in the future, all the while further undermining the European project at this critical geopolitical and normative juncture.

Alexandra Karppi is a research analyst covering the Western Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe for Freedom House and a co-host of the Talk Eastern Europe podcast. She is co-author of “Nations in Transit 2024: A Region Reordered by Autocracy and Democracy”, the findings of which form the basis of this contribution to New Eastern Europe.

EU enlargement, EU Enlargement Policy, European Union, Western Balkans