At Thessaloniki in June 2003, the European Union made a promise that sounded historic and irreversible. The heads of state and government declared that the future of the Western Balkans is within the European Union. The phrase used was "EU perspective" - Brussels jargon meaning a firm commitment that these countries can and will become members once they are ready.

More than two decades later, that promise has lost its credibility. In Tirana, in Belgrade, in Skopje, few citizens, few journalists and few politicians really believe that full EU membership is realistic in any foreseeable future. Thessaloniki became a ritual, repeated in every Council conclusion, but emptied of political substance.

There are reasons for this fatigue, on both sides.

On the EU side, the Union was absorbed by its own internal crises for more than a decade. The eurozone debt crisis from 2010 onward, the migration crisis of 2015, Brexit, and the pandemic shifted all political energy inward. Enlargement was no longer a project, it was a bureaucratic file managed by DG NEAR. The only country to join in that entire period was Croatia in 2013 - and also the last one to date. Croatia was small, geographically contiguous, economically manageable, easily absorbable. It did not change the institutional balance of the Union.

Jean-Claude Juncker, taking over as Commission President in 2014, simply captured the zeitgeist when he openly said there would be no enlargement during his five-year mandate. It was honesty that did damage: if there is no political will at the top, why should candidate countries reform?

A second excuse for stagnation became the argument about internal reform. The Union, it was said, must reform itself before it can enlarge. The core problem is known: the EU still requires unanimity in crucial fields - foreign and security policy, taxation, and above all treaty change. Even in existential questions of security, one recalcitrant member state could block any meaningful action, as we have seen repeatedly with Hungary on Russia-related sanctions and aid to Ukraine. A costly paralysis.

Some member states and many federalists argued that unanimity must be replaced by qualified majority voting before any new members are admitted, otherwise the EU would become ungovernable at 30 or 35 members. This created a further political and psychological delay for enlargement. Yet this argument was always disingenuous. Replacing unanimity requires treaty change. And treaty change itself requires unanimity. A single member state can veto the move to qualified majority. Such a reform is therefore close to impossible in the current political constellation. To make enlargement conditional on an impossible internal reform was a polite way to say no.

Then came the rupture of 24 February 2022. Russia's full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine changed the geopolitics of enlargement overnight. Suddenly enlargement became security policy. The impetus was pushed almost entirely by security considerations: how to anchor Ukraine and Moldova in Europe and prevent a grey zone that Russia could exploit.

This gave a new dynamic to the whole enlargement file, and the Western Balkans benefited from the spillover. Candidate status for Bosnia and Herzegovina, opening of accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia, a new growth plan and financial pledges. Seemingly, Thessaloniki was alive again.

However, if we look at the eligibility side - the actual state of the Western Balkan states - things have progressed at very different speeds and in very different directions. The region is not a bloc. The idea of a simultaneous accession is an illusion.

North Macedonia is the most painful case of EU failure. It changed its name, it changed its constitution, it settled a 27-year dispute with Greece at huge domestic political cost, based on an explicit promise from Brussels. Today it is blocked again, by demands from Bulgaria that have nothing to do with EU law - issues of history, language and identity. A bilateral dispute that the EU should not have allowed again.

Kosovo remains in a legal limbo. Five EU member states still do not recognize its independence. That hinders its path to the EU starting with the candidate status to the more important accession talsk. Its post independence relations with Serbia are facilitated poorly by Brussels which often favours might instead of right.

Bosnia and Herzegovina in its Dayton constitutional shape is almost inherently paralysed. A state with three presidents, a dozen governments and no functional central authority was designed to stop a war, not to join the EU. The Republika Srpska leadership under Milorad Dodik, openly aligning with Moscow and threatening secession, makes it objectively impossible to fulfil the criteria for membership.

Serbia has, under Aleksandar Vucic, become an authoritarian one-man state. The model is well known: juggling with the EU and the West, with Russia and with China, extracting money and legitimacy from all sides. EU funds, Russian energy and weapons, Chinese infrastructure and surveillance technology. Nevertheless until recently it received praise for its “European reforms” by no less than the President of the Commission Mrs. von der Leyen. In October 2025 the European Parliament itself through the Serbia resolution unusually called on “ the most senior EU officials to refrain from making unfounded statements praising the reform process in Serbia”. To date mostly because of the country’s geopolitical misalignment the Brussels tone has changed a bit. But that hasn’t impressed much the Vucic regime as recently the official honours at the funeral of convicted war criminal Mladic.

Albania has also become an authoritarian regime which is sustained in good part by narco-proceeds and displays an amazing series of kleptocratic scandals reaching the highest levels of government. The OSCE election reports show increasing state capture of the vote process - misuse of administration, vote-buying, use of the underworld to get the vote etc. However that didn’t prevent Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos to proclaim elections as “free and fair”; the EU anti corruption stance didn’t prevent her and the EU ambassador to publicly take  the side of a minister indicted of serious corruption (50 millions € evaporated in only one count) and of PM Rama protecting his minister.

Montenegro has reduced the legacy structural problems and doesn’t have external issues except some interference from Belgrade. The country is now being touted as the sole and real front-runner: it has closed many negotiation chapters and the EU has established a joint group for drafting the future Accession Treaty.

At this point it’s relevant to remember why did the Balkan peoples or the peoples from Eastern Europe want to join the EU in the first place? There were three main reasons:

First, the grand idea of a united Europe - to return to Europe after communism and the Iron Curtain; for those who suffered in the Yugoslav wars, to overcome the destructive nationalism.

Second, the promise of catching up economically via the market economy but also the EU support in the form of cohesion funds, agricultural subsidies etc.

Third, and most importantly for many reformers, support for basic EU values like those of Article 2 of the Lisbon Treaty - human dignity, freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights & freedoms. In EU jargon for candidate countries, the Copenhagen Criteria: stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, rule of law, a functioning market economy. These countries have a communist past, a rather weak state tradition, endemic clientelism etc. The prospect of EU accession was supposed to be an external anchor to strengthen those values domestically.

It is precisely on this third pillar that the EU, mainly the Commission, was blind to problems, especially in Serbia and Albania. The logic of DG NEAR was stability and absorption of funds, not democracy. Authoritarian leaders who delivered on paper - opened a chapter, adopted a law, signed a regional agreement - were praised as reformers. Democratic backsliding was whitewashed. The Commission’s annual progress reports became copy-paste exercises.

The situation in each country is primarily the responsibility of its respective politicians and society. Nevertheless, I believe it is appropriate to realistically assess the impact of the Commission's and the EU's influential enlargement policies.

This led to the current debate about "staged accession." The idea floated three years ago by the Commission later supported by members states. This May the German chancellor supported the idea and presented some details in a letter addressed to presidents of the Parliament, Commission and Council. A month later he and the French president issued a non paper with similar content at the EU/Western Balkans summit in Tivat, Montenegro.

Also in May an enlargement friendly group of five member states led by Austria and Italy signed an internal note to the Commission suggesting staged accession starting with sections of the Common Market. The idea is to replace full membership including political rights like veto/vote with gradual accession in the EU single market, institutions, programs and financial benefits. In case of bad behavior by the new kids (democratic backsliding, non alignment in major issues). The Commission is working on the issue and will probably present a comprehensive concept by the end of this year. Some steps in this direction include the accession of some countries to the “Single Euro Payment Area”, which facilitates bank transfers, and the ongoing “Roam Like at Home” initiative, which reduces the extra charges applicable to mobile phone users in other European countries to virtually zero.

However having access to the common market or even benefiting from the cohesion funds doesn’t preclude the necessary standards including foremost legality based functioning institutions. There are not supposed to be shortcuts here. However the Albanian Prime Minister Rama and Serbian President Vucic in a joint article published earlier this year in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine suggested their countries be admitted immediately in the common market and both of them would forfeit the vote , the commissioner, the MEPs and other political rights associated with membership. The catch here is that the circumvention of undesirable reforms and measures starting with the rule of law. But without them an Spanish consumer of these countries products or a Danish company operating there would not be certain to enjoy and benefit from the usual standards and rules of the Common Market.

The Russian aggression against Ukraine gave enlargement a new security rationale. That is legitimate. But security without values and standards will produce problems if not Trojan horses inside the Union.

Thessaloniki promised a European perspective. The resurrection of that perspective requires not less conditionality, but more. And it must be genuine conditionality, not the fake conditionality we have seen for the last ten years. The EU must return to the original, tough, and honest Copenhagen Criteria. Only that will be credible to both the citizens of the Western Balkans and the citizens of the EU.

*Former DP MP and minister, president of PaneuropaAlbania