Three seemingly unrelated news stories in the Western Balkans over the past three weeks have emerged as the latest data points for a thesis I posited two years ago: that the Euro-Atlantic project in the Balkans is at its end.
Consider the stories: Nikola Gruevski, the former prime minister of Macedonia, recently convicted of corruption charges, has fled the country on the eve of his incarceration and has sought asylum in Hungary; Kosovo has imposed stiff tariffson imports from both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Milorad Dodik, the newly elected Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, has declared that he will use a Serbian, rather than Bosnian, passport for his official travel.
The singular thread running through each of these developments is that any pretense of a rules-based order in the Western Balkans has collapsed.
Having realized as much for themselves, local elites are increasingly brazen in their confrontations with the EU and US.
They are convinced that this is an effective strategy for extracting tribute from the feckless diplomatic establishments in Brussels and Washington, who are eager only to maintain the illusion of regional stability.
Importantly, local elites calculate that this is a sound strategy for impressing their new, post-Western benefactors, too; Russia, China, Turkey, and the Gulf monarchies.
Some may see the suggestion that the (doubtlessly weak) rules-based order in the region has collapsed as hyperbole. But let us assess the facts soberly.
Elites like Gruevski and Dodik plunder, insult, and violate as they see fit, and escape any sanction or consequence for their actions from both local or (most) international institutions.
Meanwhile, Kosovo has lost faith in the EU’s capacity to integrate the country into the European community of states.
As a result, Pristina is entertaining all manner of once heretical policies, from trade wars to partition pacts.
And, while much ink has been spilled on illustrating why the latter proposal would represent a disastrous turn for the whole region, it is still part of an existing phenomenon – the decline in the legitimacy of the political West in the Balkans, and the turn towards alternate arrangements by local elites.
These alternative arrangements are an assortment of autochthonous and foreign-backed illiberal and authoritarian regimes.
None of them resembles anything akin to the “European”, that is, democratic, Western Balkans that has been the mantra here for nearly two decades.
Of course, events in this region are only a part of the broader crisis of international liberalism that has become especially pronounced since the onset of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the post-Brexit bedlam in the UK, and the pivot towards reactionary unilateralism in the US.
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