The two-decade history of the EU’s courtship of the western Balkans makes for unhappy reading. First came the hype and hubris of June 2003 when EU and Balkan leaders met at Thessaloniki to hail supposedly a bold new era, declaring the “future of the Balkans is within the EU”.
Then came 20 years of disappointments, lacklustre engagement by Brussels, low ambitions and general cynicism on both sides. “I can’t say things are worse in the region,” says a veteran official from one of the six aspirant Balkan countries. “But they are depressingly the same.”
Slovenia and Croatia did make it into the EU in 2004 and 2013 but their entry processes were already in train. The western Balkans — Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and North Macedonia — have long been stuck in limbo, each with its own obstacles peculiar to its own fraught and often disputatious politics.