EU Integration Without Dealing with the Past? Democratisation, Reconciliation, and Regional Cooperation in the Western Balkans
This analysis examines the stalled EU integration of Western Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia) beyond technical accession criteria. It argues that unresolved legacies of the 1990s wars, contested historical interpretations, and insufficient regional cooperation hinder democratic consolidation and reconciliation. The article highlights that dealing with the past—through war crimes prosecution, truth commissions, and memory politics—remains a formal EU membership requirement under the Stabilisation and Association Process. However, mutual mistrust and ethno-political tensions persist, trapping the region between 'Europeanisation' and 'Balkanisation'. The experiences of Germany and Austria with Vergangenheitsbewältigung are cited as models. The piece concludes that the EU's approach has shifted from post-war reconstruction to enlargement policy, but internal EU divisions and rising populism complicate the process.
Editorial responsibility
- No named human review is recorded for this page.
- Reports are grouped by semantic similarity and deterministic rules. Language models may assist titles, summaries, translation and cross-source analysis; the page itself is projected from evidence records.
- Current automated evidence projection