Once Europe’s project, the Western Balkans is now its mirror

European conceptions of the Western Balkans have long reflected the hopes and anxieties of the moment. Throughout the 20th century, the region was Europe’s powder keg – a land of ancient ethnic hatreds perpetually on the brink of violent conflict. After the wars of the 1990s, the Western Balkans became a democratic project, where peace and reconciliation, institution-building, and integration with NATO and the European Union were meant to bring these countries out of conflict and into Europe.

Today, however, this project seems to have failed. Democracy is on life support and geopolitical competition is testing the increasingly fragile consensus around EU membership in many of these countries. In this context, the Western Balkans is now portrayed as a key battleground for Europe’s future. Tracing these shifting conceptions of the region therefore provides a useful vantage point for understanding where we have been over the last 15 years and where we may be headed.

 

S: A political project

In 2003 at the EU-Western Balkans Summit held in Thessaloniki, the Western Balkans graduated from a crisis to be managed by the West to a political project to be completed by Europe. In retrospect, the consensus in Brussels, Washington, and within the expert community was remarkable. There was broad agreement that European enlargement was the best way to repair these countries’ weak institutions, finish their democratic transitions, and transform them into peaceful societies. Washington was confident that Brussels would complete this project, slowly deprioritizing the region and focusing its attention elsewhere. Meanwhile, the predominant debate in academic and policy circles was not whether Europeanization and democratization would succeed, but how this could best be achieved.

These high expectations seemed justified by positive developments in the region. The Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević had fallen in October 2000 amid significant civic mobilization, and the Ohrid Framework had been signed in North Macedonia in 2001, laying the grounds for a multi-ethnic, civic state. Then, in 2004, Slovenia became the first ex-Yugoslav republic to join the EU. Croatia seemed set to follow, opening its accession negotiations in 2005 after agreeing to cooperate with international authorities in a major war crimes case. In 2006, a package of constitutional reforms was announced in Bosnia and Herzegovina to strengthen the central state in line with European recommendations. When Montenegro gained independence that same year, it felt like even the final questions of Yugoslavia’s dissolution could be resolved peacefully.

As the 2010s dawned, however, the Western Balkans project remained incomplete, and the region was increasingly referred to as Europe’s unfinished business in academic journals, policy papers, and popular media. The eurozone crisis, followed by the migration crisis, Brexit, and democratic backsliding within the bloc, steadily shifted Brussels’s attention inward and put enlargement, though still an official policy, on the backburner. From Washington’s perspective, the end of the wars and the strong pace of NATO expansion marked a successful handover of the region to Brussels, ensuring American diplomacy was no longer the primary engine of democratization in the region.

Fatigue in Brussels and Washington was matched by setbacks in the region. Constitutional reform quickly became a dead end in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence ignited backlash in Serbia, and North Macedonia’s name dispute with Greece hampered its NATO and EU prospects. Any lingering optimism around democracy development from the 2000s had essentially faded by 2013 when Croatia joined the EU and few other countries seemed poised to follow suit. Anti-corruption protests, dubbed the Bosnian Spring, ended unsuccessfully in 2014, a massive wiretapping scandal rocked the Macedonian public in 2015, and the true shades of Aleksandar Vučić’s government were laid bare with the overnight destruction of Belgrade’s Savamala district in 2016.

From democracy to stability

By the late 2010s, the consensus around Europeanization was actively splintering. The region’s expert community began to question whether Europe’s involvement in the region was leading to democratic consolidation or whether it was propping up illiberal leaders across the Western Balkans. In a now famous 2017 blogpost, the term stabilotocracy was coined by Srđa Pavlović. It sought to capture a fundamental hypocrisy emerging in Europe: Brussels praised Western Balkan leaders for securing stability despite them being responsible for setbacks in democracy and human rights. Regional leaders were essentially performing the reforms needed to keep membership prospects alive while capturing the very institutions they were meant to be strengthening and de-politicizing. Brussels, experts came to argue, was willing to turn a blind eye to their concentration of wealth and power so long as they did not generate any crises for it to solve.

Brussels’s rebuttal came in the form of a 2018 paper by the European Commission, which sought to revive confidence in enlargement. The report offered a new accession timeline, doubled down on key areas of engagement like the rule of law, and, perhaps most strikingly, acknowledged the risk of stalled enlargement: regional instability. Despite the paper’s aims, to many observers it underscored just how far these countries had drifted from the prospects set out for them at Thessaloniki. The leading rationale for enlargement was no longer democratic transformation, but the management of instability on the EU’s doorstep.

Developments in the region reinforced this growing pessimism, especially after two different democratic breakthroughs fell short of their lofty aims. In North Macedonia, Nikola Gruevski’s downfall in 2017 appeared to vindicate years of civic mobilization and renewed Euro-Atlantic engagement. Three years later, Montenegro’s opposition finally ended Milo Đukanović’s three decades of dominance at the ballot box. Yet, in both countries, hopes of a decisive democratic reset gave way to familiar patterns of ethno-national filibustering, political paralysis, and persistent corruption. Even with two of the region’s most widely cited stabilitocrats out of power, neither North Macedonia nor Montenegro succeeded in fundamentally altering their hybrid political systems.

Across the region, these political systems have proven impervious to change, even to global shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic or Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If anything, these events crystallized the steady downward trends for democracy and human rights in the region. Take Serbia for example, which in 2020 declared a state of emergency that set the stage for violent crackdowns by police during anti-lockdown protests and allowed for a further consolidation of executive control. Since then, Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine has only bolstered Vučić’s position, allowing him to deepen his long-standing, geopolitical balancing act. While Belgrade has quietly supplied ammunition to Ukraine and maintained close ties with western governments, just recently welcoming the Ukrainian president himself to the capital, it has simultaneously refused to impose sanctions on Russia and preserved its political and economic relationship with the Kremlin.

A different kind of battlefield

These global shocks, however, have accelerated another shift in how the Western Balkans is understood by policymakers and experts alike. Today, the region is often described as a strategic battlefield or a laboratory at a crossroads. No longer viewed as Brussels’s unfinished democratic project, the Western Balkans is increasingly portrayed as central to Europe’s own future. In this view, the region’s current challenges may even preview the wider continent’s potential future struggles: simultaneously defending democratic institutions, maintaining geopolitical influence, and preserving the credibility of the European project itself.

The Western Balkans is no longer marked by incomplete transitions, but durable anti-democratic regimes. There are a few standout offenders, but even fewer bright spots. Serbia’s deepening repression of civic activists underscores the government’s authoritarian turn since the fatal canopy collapse in Novi Sad brought on nationwide anti-government protests in 2024. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are politically deadlocked by chronic institutional paralysis on the one hand and fragmented party politics on the other. North Macedonia’s integration prospects remain stalled by bilateral disputes, while the EU’s supposed frontrunners face democratic downturns. Montenegro remains beset by the weaponization of ethnic politics and durable patronage networks, while Albania faces executive aggrandizement under an increasingly domineering Prime Minister Edi Rama. Alongside this protracted democracy crisis is a demographic one. No reflection of this region’s trajectory in the last 15 years is complete without mentioning that the region is losing people at one of the fastest rates in Europe.

Geopolitically, Europe is no longer (if it ever was) the only game in town. The emerging multipolar order has only strengthened domestic elites’ grip on power. Chinese investments, Russian energy and disinformation, and growing Turkish and Gulf engagement can now offer regional leaders like Serbia’s Vučić a lifeline. Although EU membership is still an aspiration of most citizens in the region, public polling reflects this growing ambivalence. Credibility for the EU process is arguably at its lowest, with the pace of negotiations in Montenegro and Albania feeling seriously out of sync. Major shortcomings have been identified by local experts and are acknowledged by the European Commission itself.

The result of these developments is that academic and policy experts are no longer primarily studying democratization in the Western Balkans, but topics like regime durability, authoritarian adaptation, and digital surveillance. The focus has shifted from formal institutions to informal networks and state capture; from corruption as a symptom of weak governance to corruption as a governing strategy; from civil society as a vehicle for democratization to a contested arena of influence; and from western-led transformation to an increasingly multipolar struggle.

Worryingly, Europe’s latest understanding of the Western Balkans seems to be diverging rapidly from the United States’ vision for the region. Donald Trump’s administration appears openly driven by strategic and economic interests rather than democratic transformation. The recent signing of a strategic dialogue with Serbia, even as the country’s democracy standards tank faster than any other country in the region, embodies the brazenness of the current approach. Moreover, US efforts to unilaterally reinstate a new High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina suggest that this administration is happy to throw its weight about in the region. Add in the removal of sanctions against Bosnian Serb leaders and the Trump family’s business dealings in Albania, and there is real reason to fear that Washington not only views the Western Balkans exclusively through the lens of its national interests, but possibly even personal gains.

Black mirror?

The trajectory of the Western Balkans is not exceptional, as it now shares strikingly similar challenges with the wider continent. Geopolitics are polarizing communities and forcing states into making difficult decisions; demographic shifts are testing decades-old institutional models; energy politics are enriching few while endangering many; and emerging digital tools offer chances for both renewed repression and democratic opportunity. As these domestic crises come to a head, some suggest we are contending with a new world order in which the US is no longer Europe’s friend, but a foe. Thinking pessimistically, the Western Balkans could be a bellwether of a darker future for Europe, a mirror of those shared uncertainties.

Yet, there is a different way to read the Western Balkans that provides a more hopeful future for Europe. At the moment that this article goes to print, citizens are on the streets demanding change, with some even taking it to the ballot box. In Albania, weeks of mass demonstrations have snowballed from opposition to a controversial coastal development into wider demands for government resignations. In Serbia, student-led mobilizations have emerged as the country’s most credible electoral challenge in years, with elections rapidly approaching. As Hungary taught us this spring, nothing in the broader post-socialist region is as stable as it may at first seem. These movements may not succeed, but their persistence complicates any story of inevitable authoritarian disaster.

To focus only on institutional decline and authoritarian leadership in the Western Balkans is to miss the remarkable resilience of citizens in this region, and indeed across the continent. If Europe once placed too much faith in institutional incentives to produce democracy from above, the last few months in the region offer a reminder that pressure for democratic change can still come from below. In the Western Balkans and across Europe, institutions of democracy may be under duress, but the democratic impulse is not.

 

Alexandra Karppi is a researcher and analyst at King’s College London covering the Western Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe. She is also the co-host of the Talk Eastern Europe podcast and YouTube channel.