by Professor Sokol Lleshi, University of New York Tirana
Executive Summary
The recent reinvigoration of the EU enlargement process to the Western Balkan region should be understood as an exogenous effect of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, which entails a consistent and intricate interaction between the geopolitical reasons in favor of the EU enlargement and the transformative power of the European Union. Analyzing the costs of the non-enlargement of the EU to the Western Balkans requires acknowledgment of the unique features of the EU polity, which relate to the EU integration as a peace project, an efficient single market, and a political system based on liberal democracy. From this perspective, the geopolitical drive and the transformative role of the EU are two sides of the same coin. In the absence of full membership of the Western Balkans in the European Union, the transformative role of the EU will erode, and the leverage of non-Western external powers will increase, causing the Western Balkan region to drift away from the European Union. The socioeconomic convergence of the Westen Balkan region with the EU will not be sufficient if it is not accompanied by an externally induced political accountability. Furthermore, Western Balkan societies risk becoming more polarized, and the gap between the citizens and the ruling elite may widen.
Introduction
The enlargement of the European Union (EU) has been, on the one hand, an affirmation of its identity, and on the other hand, a policy instrument for reinforcing and projecting the EU’s role as a normative power within and beyond its institutional boundaries. To a large extent, the EU’s enlargement policy is described as being central to its foreign policy (Armakolas et al., 2024; Koval & Vachudova, 2024), which enables the EU to sustain the stability and continuity of its peace project, as the most significant feature of EU integration. The central dilemma that the EU faces when addressing the prospective accession of the candidate states of the Western Balkans revolves around the assumed dichotomy between the transformative power of the EU to in shaping the domestic political system of the candidate states in the Western Balkans and the geopolitical momentum of the enlargement after following the Russian aggression against Ukraine since February 2022.
The process of EU enlargement to the Western Balkans, and the enlargement policy itself, with its regulatory, centralized, asymmetric, and rule-based practices, is usually construed as a self-contained and insular process (Džihić & Rauch, 2026; Morina, 2025; Shahini, 2024). The gap between the normative underpinings of the EU enlargement policy and the actual “ways of ruling” of the candidate countries in the Western Balkans is quite apparent. In other words, the presence of politicized public administrations, weak enforcement of rule-of-law norms, inconsistent practices of political accountability, and pervasive political corruption in the Western Balkans, which is conventionally referred to as “state capture” (Džankić, 2025; Vachudova, 2019, p. 64), bring to the fore the actual relevant scope and effect of the transformative power of the EU on the political systems of the Western Balkans. This particular perspective separates the transformative power of the EU from the existing geopolitical context. The geopolitical momentum is defined as leading to a suboptimal outcome of the EU enlargement, particularly if security and geopolitical reasons prevail over “strict norm enforcement” (Džihić & Rauch, 2026, p. 8) regarding the rule of law, media freedom, and accountable political institutions, transforming the EU enlargement policy into an instrument that rewards political membership (Nić et al., 2026, p. 8) of selected candidate countries in the Western Balkans.
However, when the EU is primarily understood as a sustained peace project, with its unique post-national and post-sovereigntist institutionalized identity that combines liberal democracy with a single market, the geopolitical context becomes consistently interlinked with the transformative power of the EU, as it has always been in the previous rounds of EU enlargement to post-authoritarian countries, despite the different degrees of geopolitical challenges. Henceforth, this policy paper argues that to analyze the costs of the non-enlargement of the EU to the Western Balkans and the efficiency of the current enlargement policy itself, it is important to consider the externalization effect (Hooghe & Marks, 2005), as suggested by the neofunctionalist approach, in conjunction with institutional reforms and political transformations in the candidate states. As Hooghe and Marks state, according to the neofunctionalist approach, the externalization effect is manifested as “solidarity induced by conflict with a foreign power – [that] can be a powerful source of integration” (2005, p. 215).
This perspective is of utmost relevance to the Western Balkans, whose trajectory towards EU accession has experienced inconsistent credibility of the EU’s commitments, as characterized by its strategic ambiguity (Džihić & Rauch, 2026, p. 6) when the European continent was not yet facing increasing geopolitical challenges from competing external powers (Morina, 2025). At the same time, it is important to highlight the fact that political representatives of the candidate states in the region, which are primarily incumbent governing elites, have not been consistently committed to the transformative political and institutional reforms (Džankić, Keil, & Kmezić et al., 2019; Kmezić, 2019, p. 93) demanded by the EU. The Russian war against Ukraine led to the phasing out of the EU’s Eastern Partnership policy. This previous EU policy had emphasized the increased linkage of the EU – and hence its leverage – to the eastern flank of the its institutional border. The overhaul of this policy and its replacement with an encompassing, vigorous, and renewed EU enlargement policy for Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, and for the Western Balkans, is a strong indication of this externalization. As a consequence, Zelenskyy’s response to Chancellor Merz’s policy proposal for an “associate membership” of Ukraine to the EU that “[w]e are defending Europe – fully, not partially, and not with half measures”(Hayden, 2026) underlines the pervasive and constant feature of this round of EU enlargement, indicating the external threat to the European peace project and security. The question posed by Hooghe and Marks (2005) two decades ago as to whether “external conflict with a foreign power” (p. 215) will shape the process of EU integration should be heeded and answered in the affirmative.
The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the role of external third parties involved in geopolitical competition with the EU in exerting influence in the semi-periphery of the EU by promoting alternative developmental and political trajectories that fall short of stable and consolidated liberal democracies, and which may stall the EU accession of the Western Balkan region, set the bounds for the EU enlargement to the Western Balkans and the Eastern Trio. As the prevailing official narrative of the EU integration project evokes the resilience of its peace project through crises, the ability of the EU to forestall being downgraded or facing disintegration has been dependent on constant cycles of institutional and policy innovations, including its enlargement policy. Policy derogations and differentiated horizontal or vertical integration of the existing EU member states (Schimmelfennig et al., 2023), after successful rounds of EU enlargement, attest to David Mitrany’s functionalist idea of the EU polity as “a network of jurisdictions with variable membership, variable decision rules and of variable durability, depending on the need and acceptability” (Hooghe & Marks, 2005, p. 208). Similarly, the establishment of the Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, “to financially support gradual integration” (Morina, 2025, p. 14) and “to integrate the region more closely into the single market” (2025, p. 14) prior to full membership, as well as the revision of the EU enlargement methodology highlighting the reversibility and close monitoring of the rule of law and democratic political institutions, through pre- and post-accession mechanisms such as the Rule of Law Report, demonstrate the important role of institutional innovations of the EU enlargement policy that reduce the costs of credible commitments of the ruling elites of the candidate states to the EU enlargement path. The process of the EU enlargement to the Western Balkan region involves, albeit to different degrees, practices of member state building (Keil, 2013; Keil & Arkan, 2014) and externally induced political accountability of political institutions, and of normative “alignment with the EU’s values, laws, standards, policies” (Shahini, 2024, p. 11). Therefore, the real and consequential costs of the non-enlargement of the EU to the Western Balkan region, as discussed in this policy paper, will affect, to a larger extent, the sustainability of the transformative reforms rather than merely the socioeconomic convergence (Shahini, 2024, p. 11).
Exogeneous Spillover as the Geopolitical Driver of the EU Enlargement to the Western Balkans
The actorness and normative power of the EU in “an increasingly rogue and illiberal international environment” (Džihić & Rauch, 2026, p. 8) is predicated upon the EU’s response to “competing geopolitical actors” (Džihić & Rauch, 2026, p. 9), and to conflicts or wars in the near abroad of the European Union. Phasing out the EU Eastern Partnership policy for the Eastern Trio and the opening of accession negotiations with Albania, as well as progressing with the accession negotiations with Montenegro, in the last few years are strong indicators that the Russian aggression against Ukraine has acted as a catalyst for provoking an exogeneous spillover (Binici, 2020, p. 12) to the EU enlargement policy and process. On the other hand, had the EU institutions been reluctant to exploit their policy innovation skills in the policy area of EU enlargement, such as the gradual integration as an example of policy innovation, the Western Balkans Growth Plan and other overlapping mechanisms of conditionality and benchmarking, which according to some experts do not help in resolving the inconsistency of the EU’s credibility (Emerson & Blockmans, 2025), the mutual interdependence between the exogeneous spillover of the continuous geopolitical challenge and the transformative power of the EU in the Western Balkans would not have been obvious. It should be noted that this concrete exogeneous spillover, in combination with the actual institutional and policy innovations of the EU enlargement process to the Western Balkans, has enabled the EU to break the cycle of “inconsistency and incremental transactionalism” (Džankić, 2025, p.75) and constrain the executive aggrandizement of the incumbent governments in the candidate states.
The understanding that the geopolitical drive of the EU enlargement and its transformative power concerning the Western Balkans work at cross-purposes obfuscates the consistent interaction, if not interdependence, between security and geopolitical reasons for the EU to enlarge to post-authoritarian countries and political and institutional reforms, even in the previous round of EU enlargement. The historical context of the EU accession path of post-communist central European countries was marked with initial doubts and incertitudes on the part of key representatives of EU member states, which “tried to keep the new democratizing member states at bay” (Koval & Vachudova, 2024, p. 2) and initially provided European agreements that were short of full membership of the EU. However, the “membership perspective came after…missteps by the EU” (Koval & Vachudova, 2024, p. 2). As Koval and Vachudova argue, drawing parallels between the reinvigoration of the EU accession pathway of the central East European and the EU accession pathway of the Western Balkans: “In 1999 and 2022, the EU reached for enlargement in response to the war in its neighborhood” (2024). Although seemingly a less complex EU enlargement, the 1980s enlargement to the post-authoritarian states of the southern European region had still been motivated by an exogenous spillover effect due to the daunting task of safeguarding the emerging democracies of Spain, Portugal, and Greece (Nić et al., 2026). Ultimately, despite the different degrees of external challenges to the EU political system and regional integration, the geopolitical context has been a consistent structural feature of the reinvigorated EU enlargement policies and processes to regions that cannot simply be relegated to the external bounds of the EU as a “ring of friends”. For these reasons, this opportune critical momentum of the EU enlargement that emerges as a consequence of the exogenous shocks or due to “significant change[s] in [the] regional or international system” (Binici, 2020, p. 81) undermining the EU peace project and the single market (Anghel & Jones, 2024) compels the EU to be innovative in the EU enlargement process. Henceforth, the costs of not enlarging to the Western Balkans are higher.
Socioeconomic Convergence without Political Accountability
Although it may sound preposterous to claim that the Western Balkan region will attain a sustainable socioeconomic convergence, in the short term, with the EU, this particular EU policy goal with regard to the Western Balkans has been central to supporting the integration of regional economies into the EU single market for quite some time. The Common Regional Market (CRM) framework that was established for the Western Balkans 6, within the framework of the Berlin Process, predates the Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, a roadmap and financial instrument for economic integration formulated in 2023. This particular economic policy of the EU towards the Western Balkans reflects a certain path dependency (Hooghe & Marks, 2019, p. 115) of previous similar policies and is predicated on the institutional and policy practice of functional spillover. Furthermore, the Growth Plan for the Western Balkans is expected to have political effects as well, linking the financial support to “Reform Agendas, which in part concern the political and the rule of law fundamentals, plus some issues not subject to the EU acquis” (Emerson & Blockmans, 2025, p. 2). Just recently, the European Commission “made available €49 million to Albania, € 44.2 million to Montenegro, and € 65.7 million to North Macedonia under the Reform and Growth Facility” (European Commission, 2026). These funds are allocated primarily to research and innovation, digital technology, and educational policy and to foster a more competitive business environment.
Notwithstanding the partial implications of this economic and financial policy, which may galvanize norm adoption (Kmezić, 2019, p. 89) concerning the rule of law and democratic institutions in the Western Balkans, without full membership as a final outcome (Morina, 2025, p. 2) of the EU enlargement policy, the socioeconomic convergence will not be sufficient to sustain politically accountable democratic institutions in the long run. One could argue that “…[the] gradual, incremental and horizontal expansion of regional institutionalization, …and regulatory capacity” (Binici, 2020, p. 84) of the EU policies, related to the EU single market, in the Western Balkan region may incentivize domestic interest groups to demand a more efficient and professional public administration, basic rule-of-law practices, and legal predictability without being able to make the incumbent governments and the executive power politically accountable. To a certain extent, if the EU and its institutions and representatives, through the EU enlargement policy, were to desist from interacting primarily with government elites, referred to commonly as “gatekeepers” (Kmezić, 2019, p. 89; Richter & Wunsch, 2020; Vachudova, 2019, p. 66), and involve instead more inclusive political institutions, such as the parliament, and state bureaucratic agencies that exercise horizontal accountability, socioeconomic convergence would be embedded into stable, democratic, and accountable political institutions. The experience of the erosion of democracy during the 16-year rule of Fidesz in Hungary, which was discontinued as a consequence of the societal mobilization and the appeal of restoring the affinity and identification of Hungary with Europe, as well as the short-lived but detrimental rule of the Law and Justice Party in Poland, indicate that such governments “…comply with the rules of the single market while backsliding on liberal democracy” (Hooghe & Marks, 2019, p. 1125). Ultimately, non-enlargement to the Western Balkans constitutes a high cost for the consolidation of democracy and rule of law in this region.
Drifting Away from the EU: Authoritarian Leverage of External Powers
In the absence of a successful enlargement of the EU to the Western Balkan region, due to the EU’s “strategic ambiguity,” and when the full membership of the Western Balkans is not perceived as the utmost end goal of the EU enlargement policy (Nić et.al, 2026, p. 3), the geopolitical competition between the EU and external powers such as Russia and China, among others, may radically tilt in favor of the latter. When the process of gradual integration is not sufficient to achieve the “political integration” (Risse, 2005, p. 292) of the Western Balkan countries into the EU—a process that implies, among other factors, a considerable political pressure exerted by pro-EU interest groups, civil society, and citizens compelling the political elite to “shift their loyalties, expectations, and political activities towards a new center” (Haas, 1958, p. 16, as quoted in Risse, 2005, p. 292)—the Western Balkan countries will drift away from the EU and develop or reinforce economic, political, and cultural linkages with the external powers, whose leverage will be enhanced. These kinds of arguments, which have been articulated by other experts before (Armakolas et al., 2024; Emerson & Blockmans, 2025; Morina, 2025), rest on the historical experience of the Western Balkans as a region in which “democracy – both as an ideology and as a political regime – has never become socially or institutionally embedded” (Vachudova, 2020 quoted in Džankić, 2025, p. 74; see also Mishkova, 2014). It has been proven that the trade-off between stability and democracy, which for years had been the EU’s informal, yet influential, policy stance on the Western Balkans, at times fomenting the illusion that stability and democracy are “inextricably linked” (Džankić, 2025, p. 75), undermines the transformative power of the EU.
Taking advantage of the financial crisis of 2008, and of enlargement fatigue, external powers aimed to provide an alternative route to economic growth, modernization, and cultural and foreign policy affinities to the Western Balkan countries. The economic diplomacy of China in the Western Balkan region, as part of the global Belt and Road Initiative, has materialized into Chinese investments and developmental projects in infrastructure, energy, and transport (Chrzová et al., 2019; Rrustemi et al., 2019). On the other hand, Russia, exploiting the cultural, religious, and historical ties with the South Slavic states in the Balkans, has meddled in the region not only as an economic actor, investing in the oil industry, power plants, and tourism, but also as an ideological “disrupter” (Rrustemi et al., 2019, p. 107) of the societal consensus and support for the EU accession trajectory of the Western Balkan societies. Disseminating disinformation, supporting ethnonationalist leaders such as Dodik of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the 2018 constitutional referendum in North Macedonia, and fomenting skepticism if not distrust towards Euro–Atlantic institutions in Montenegro, Russia has intended to exercise its authoritarian leverage to forestall progress towards the EU accession of the Western Balkan countries and entrench authoritarian leaders in power, acting as a hindrance to the “return to Europe” of the Western Balkan region. It should be reiterated that the economic investments of the external powers in the Western Balkans are characterized as “corrosive capital” (Ben, 2023; Prelec, 2020), as exemplified by the Železara Smederevo steel manufacturing privatization in Serbia (Ben, 2023). In short, political elites and incumbent governments, acting as gatekeepers, allow corrosive capital investments that ultimately weaken political accountability, undermine sustainable economic growth, disregard wider public interests, and challenge rule-of-law practices. In the long run, if the overall goal of the EU enlargement to the Western Balkans dissipates, the region will be mired in a constant and yet uncertain geopolitical competition between the EU and non-Western external powers.
EU candidate countries that are characterized by contested statehood or bilateral disputes, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and North Macedonia, are potentially more vulnerable to stagnation in terms of EU accession prospects and non-Western authoritarian leverage. The existing EU enlargement policy does not seem to have a clear strategy aimed at overcoming the structural invariants (Bechev, 2004) of ethnonationalism and intraethnic divides in the Western Balkans. As Koneska et al. argue, “these countries have been failing to balance between the predominant pro-EU discourse and popular support on the one hand, and challenges posed by the…unstable nation-state constellations and the latter’s incompatibility with the process of EU integration, on the other” (2023, p. 187). Predicated on regional cooperation and reconciliation norms, the policy goals of the Berlin Process, which sought to forge a post-sovereigntist and post-national state identity (Sako & Lleshi, 2025) of the Western Balkan countries, has had a limited effect across the region. The very fact that candidate countries such as Serbia, and to some extent Bosnia and Herzegovina, do not align their foreign policy with the EU Foreign and Security Policy shows that the ideological, cultural, and political influence of external powers is equally powerful and an impediment to a European identification and belongingness of these countries. In the end, besides other relevant factors, it should not come as a surprise that Montenegro and Albania, countries that have consistently aligned their foreign policy with the EU’s Foreign and Security Policy, are primed as the frontrunners of the EU enlargement to the region.
Elite–Citizen Divisions and Erosion of the EU Transformative Power
Although there is considerable criticism of the policy of gradual integration and the overlapping and competing mechanisms of assessing the compliance of the candidate countries with the EU acquis, as well as democratic practices and rule-of-law norms, the EU institutions, through these innovative policy mechanisms of the EU enlargement policy such as gradual integration, “safeguard clauses” (Nić et al., 2026, p. 2), and “post-accession conditionality” (Nić et al., 2026, p. 5), and “transitional arrangements” (Lippert et al., 2026) can bring about a sustainable process of member state building. This particular goal entails accountable democratic institutions, good governance, and rule-of-law practices (Kmezić, 2019). However, if the EU institutions negotiate and interact primarily with the political elite and incumbent governments, without “widen[ing] genuine public participation in the decision-making” (Morina, 2025, p. 9) and without transforming the national parliaments of the candidate countries into pivotal arenas of policymaking, democratic accountability, and bipartisan cooperation, the transformative power of the EU will erode over time. The EU institutions in cooperation with national parliaments, without sidelining the incumbent governments, and civil society organizations need to formulate, sustain, and disseminate a communicative action process that enables societal dialogue and deliberation related to the member state building practices in the candidate countries. As a consequence, instead of demanding that candidate countries’ governments pursue a more inclusive and cooperative society-wide strategy (Morina, 2025), the actual process of benchmark mechanisms, monitoring, and communicative action processes could succeed in responding to the “right to democracy” and not just a “right of accession” (O’Brennan, 2001) of the Western Balkan societies by enforcing an externally induced political accountability in this region.
According to the Balkan Barometer of December 2025 (Balkan Barometer 2025, 2025), 64 percent of Western Balkan citizens on average support EU membership, a much higher percentage than in previous years or decades. If the EU enlargement policy continues to be characterized by contradictions, inconsistencies, and a lack of credible commitments to full membership of the Western Balkan countries, the gap between citizens and the ruling elites will widen. Such a persistent elite divide will potentially undermine the prospects of EU membership of Western Balkan countries and provoke another cycle of competitive authoritarian rule and democratic backsliding or further entrench the existing competitive authoritarian regimes in the region. At best, the EU will be compelled to respond to political and social mobilization in the Western Balkans in favor of restoring the EU prospect of the region, provided that the citizens themselves have not already succumbed to desolation.
Policy Recommendations
- The EU institutions and representatives need to constrain the exclusive influence of the executive and transform the legislature in each of the candidate countries as the focal point of political accountability and cooperation.
- An efficient and sustainable process of member state building should be predicated on effective state bureaucracy and institutional mechanisms of horizontal accountability, as well as an autonomous and professionalized judiciary.
- Socioeconomic convergence is not sufficient if not supported by externally induced political accountability, which recognizes the pivotal role of pro-EU constituencies and civil society.
- The process of EU enlargement to the Western Balkans needs to be framed as a barrier to geopolitical competition with other external powers, which undermines the European integration as a unique peace project and as a post-national political system.
- The EU, by upholding its commitment to full membership of the candidate countries as the end goal of the enlargement policy, will avoid a further divide between citizens and the political elite, which may instigate a deepening of democratic backsliding and authoritarian rule in the Western Balkans.
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The paper authored by Prof Lleshi on this topic is part of a project implemented by the Albanian Institute for international Studies (AIIS) and supported by a grant from Open Society Institute – Sofia Foundation (OSIS) with the support of Open Society Foundations (OSFs).
