The EU Enlargement Utopia: Why the Western Balkans are not guaranteed their place within the Union
EU enlargement in the Western Balkans is stalling not due to lack of political will alone, but because the accession framework assumes institutional capacities that many post-conflict states do not possess, while simultaneously being undermined by internal EU veto politics. As a result, the process has become structurally self-defeating, suggesting a shift toward staged, sectoral integration rather than binary membership conditionality is increasingly necessary.
In June 2003, the European Union gathered in Thessaloniki and made a promise to the Western Balkans: membership was not a question of if, but when. Twenty-three years later, and still, not a single Western Balkan state – among which Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia – has joined, while certain states, like Ukraine and Moldova, gained preferential treatment (The New Union Post, 2026). Bosnia and Herzegovina, for one, waited nineteen years between that promise and EU candidate status, finally granted in December 2022, and has since watched accession negotiations stall almost immediately after opening; Serbia has been formally negotiating since 2014 – twelve years – with only two chapters provisionally closed and its process effectively frozen; Montenegro’s process is also currently dragging on for fourteen years, and as such, we notice a pattern, in which a promise remains just that.
The standard explanation for this impasse is political will: nationalist obstruction and institutional deadlock in Sarajevo, reform failure in Tirana, enlargement fatigue in Brussels. But what this fails to take into account, is that the EU’s accession framework was designed for a category of state which the Western Balkan countries are simply not – meaning, that instead of states that already possess the basic institutional architecture required to implement what the EU demands, for instance functioning central governments, administrative capacity, rule of law infrastructure, and market economies, Western Balkan candidate-states see ethnic power-sharing arrangements, and deeply embedded informal economies as the everyday norm (Koeth, 2012; López Domènech, 2026). Expecting reform towards perfect democratic ideals from such states is rather utopian; therefore, to be able ot further envision their eventual access to the union’s benefits, a change in the relationship conditions must be considered.
Copenhagen 1993: What’s to Praise and Where it Failed
Indeed, the Copenhagen Criteria, established in 1993, set three conditions for EU membership: stable democratic institutions guaranteeing the rule of law, a functioning market economy, and the administrative capacity to implement the EU acquis (European Council, 1993). These were reasonable to expect from post-communist states like Poland, Hungary, or the Czech Republic in the late 1990s – states transitioning “westward”, with functioning central governments, developed bureaucracies, and market economies emerging from their socialist years. But for a country like Bosnia and Herzegovina – war-torn at the time, and thus much more focused on stopping conflict rather than effective democratic management – those assumptions were not reasonable.
The framework’s fragility is compounded by a structural vulnerability unaccounted for by the Copenhagen Criteria: the requirement for unanimous member state consent gives any existing EU member a veto over any candidate’s progress, for any reason. It is for that reason, for example, that Croatia is currently blocking Montenegro’s accession negotiations on Chapter 31 – covering foreign, security and defence policy – demanding resolution of six bilateral disputes rooted in the 1991-1995 war, including compensation for prisoners of war, the demarcation of maritime borders, and the return of a training ship (ANSA, 2026) – all the while, Montenegro is widely considered the most advanced Western Balkans candidate (European Parliament, 2026), having provisionally closed 18 of 33 negotiation chapters. Meanwhile, eight EU member states – including the Netherlands, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Sweden, and the three Baltic states – blocked the opening of Cluster 3 negotiations with Serbia in July 2026, citing rule of law concerns and insufficient alignment with EU foreign policy on Russia, prompting Serbian media close to President Vučić to describe the move as a “betrayal” by neighbouring countries (European Western Balkans, 2026; Novinite, 2026). The EU itself has acknowledged that it “cannot and does not wish to import bilateral disputes” – but the consensus requirement structurally guarantees that it does, making bilateral resentment an integral part of the process, blocking certain states from the promised integration (The New Union Post, 2026).
A Lingering Conflict
The Dayton Agreement of 1995 between the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia may have ended three and a half years of brutal conflict, but it also created, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the most complex and dysfunctional governance structures in the world: two entities – the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska – each with their own presidents, parliaments, police forces, and budgets, presiding over a weak central state with three rotating presidents and a parliament requiring ethnic consensus on virtually every decision (Wankiewicz-Kłoczko, 2025). Yet, the agreement was, in theory, “a masterpiece of conflict resolution” that simultaneously established “an exceptionally complex and inefficient system of governance” – one that ethno-nationalist elites have since exploited “as a lucrative mechanism for appropriating state resources” (Wankiewicz-Kłoczko, 2025).
As such, every reform the EU requires of Bosnia must pass through those same institutions, designed as to inevitably produce deadlock. For instance, in early 2025, the Republika Srpska regional parliament ordered its Serbian representatives to block the decisions of national institutions, paralysing reforms crucial for European integration – a move described as a “threat to the constitutional order” by Western powers (Martin-Colonna, 2025). Transparency International observes, in turn, that it is political elites obstructing reforms specifically to preserve control over institutions and the distribution of power (EUalive, 2026). The result is that as of June 2026, Bosnia has not delivered on a single one of its 113 committed reform steps – putting at risk not only its EU trajectory but nearly €1 billion in Growth Plan funding, including projects to modernise energy infrastructure, roads, railways, and digital services (Topić, 2026; EUalive, 2026). Bosnia’s eventual obtention of candidate status was not because meaningful reform progress had been made, but because the Russo-Ukrainian conflict prompted the EU to revise its enlargement calculus for geopolitical reasons (OBCT, 2026). The European Commission’s own 2025 Bosnia progress report confirms that its recommendations from the previous year “were not implemented […] and remain valid” (European Commission, 2025).
Superficial Compliance Meets Structural Incapacity
Albania presents a different failure mode but the same underlying problem. Unlike Bosnia, Albania made genuine reform efforts, adopted anti-corruption strategies, completed the vetting of judges and prosecutors, and fulfilled 21 reform measures under the EU Growth Plan between December 2024 and June 2025 (EESC, 2025). The European Commission’s 2025 Albania report describes it as “moderately prepared” – faint praise after over a decade of candidacy (European Commission, 2025).
The problem is rather structural implementation. Albania’s shadow economy was estimated at 31.9% of GDP in 2023 – approximately $18 billion in other terms – driven by weak regulatory enforcement, limited institutional capacity, and corruption (Lamprecht & Strohm, 2026). This contrasts with an EU average informal economy of roughly 10%, underscoring Albania’s exceptional status in Europe (Albanian Conservative Institute, 2025). Organised crime penetration of state institutions has been explicitly documented by the European Commission since 2018, when it identified “clear elements of state capture, including links with organised crime and corruption at all levels of government and administration” across the Western Balkans, including Albania (Albanian Conservative Institute, 2025). The 2025 report confirms that while SPAK – Albania’s specialised anti-corruption body – has made tangible progress, prevention mechanisms remain weak and corruption risks persist across multiple sectors (European Commission, 2025). Witnesses and journalists exposing corruption continue to face threats; criminal networks maintain links to politics and law enforcement (Sejdiu, 2026).
The accession framework rewards the passage of laws, but it is structurally ill-equipped to assess whether those laws are implemented in a state where informal economic networks and criminal actors are embedded in public institutions. Albania can demonstrate compliance on paper while the underlying structural reality remains unchanged – and the framework, by design, cannot reliably tell the difference.
The Alternative
The little hope given by the fallbacks in accomplishments needed to meet EU criteria does not inherently imply that the integration project must be abandoned. The geopolitical cost of leaving countries such as and beyond Bosnia and Albania in permanent limbo – institutionally fragile, economically stagnant, and increasingly attractive to external actors – is real and growing. What is being argued is that the binary logic of the current framework – full membership at the end of a decades-long process, or nothing – is the wrong instrument for such states’ level of institutional development.
The most credible alternative is staged sectoral integration: decoupling specific EU benefits from the single membership outcome and tying them instead to measurable sectoral reforms. Single market access for specific industries, customs union participation, Schengen candidacy, and EU structural funding could each be offered as separable rewards, achievable on shorter timeframes and tied to specific, verifiable conditions rather than comprehensive acquis compliance that presupposes a functioning state apparatus. The EU Growth Plan for the Western Balkans was a partial attempt at this logic – offering integration incentives tied to specific reform steps rather than full accession (Vasić, 2026). Bosnia’s complete failure to deliver on any of those 113 steps suggests the problem is not the incentive structure but the institutional capacity to respond to it – which means even the Growth Plan’s conditionality assumes more than Bosnia can currently deliver.
The European Political Community, proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron in May 2022 and inaugurated in Prague that October, was an attempt to create a flexible framework for political and economic coordination that did not require full EU membership (Stanicek, 2022). Its weakness is that it has remained underspecified and underpowered – a diplomatic gesture rather than a structured integration pathway. The Robert Schuman Foundation has proposed a step-by-step membership model with a formal consolidation phase, precisely to address the gap between the framework’s demands and Western Balkan institutional realities (Mirel, 2022). Nevertheless, even though neither proposal has been systematically applied, both point in the right direction – the goal is now to couple feasibility and specificity with political realities that exist as historical footprints in Western Balkan states.
In sum, the EU’s Western Balkans enlargement process is not failing because of bad faith on either side but rather because the framework was built for a different kind of state. As has been seen through examples of Bosnia and Albania, those states’ institutional architecture, issued from complex coexistence which follows years of devastating conflict, is a structural reality that legislative compliance alone cannot override. Moreover, the consensus requirement, which allows any member state to block any candidate’s progress for any reason, means the framework is vulnerable to bilateral vetoes that have nothing to do with reform criteria, as seen through Croatia’s blocking of Montenegro and eight member states’ blocking of Serbia both demonstrate this month alone. So, after twenty-three years of the same process producing the same result, the promise of Thessaloniki deserves a framework capable of keeping it.
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