The EU wants the southeast European region to join Europe, analysts said, which was made clear at the recent Union conference in Berlin.
Leaders from Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) attended the August 28th meeting, where participants agreed to form a joint strategy for enhanced regional political and economic co-operation.
“All states in the western Balkans should have the opportunity to join the European Union if they fulfill the accession requirements,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the conference.
“Germany sees this region as part of the EU and will work on the European idea of integration,” Germany Ambassador to BiH Christian Hellbach said.
According to Former Macedonian Ambassador to NATO Nano Ružin, “the idea of the summit was to send a message that the Balkans belongs to Europe, and not to some other region.” This message, he told SETimes, was in part aimed at the interest of Russia in the Balkans.
Jelena Milic, director of the Belgrade-based Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies, agreed.
“Messages from the summit are encouraging for the region. And, yes, this is a way of creating a distance to Serbia from Russia,” she told SETimes.
Over the next three years, the EU hopes to solve three key problems that plague the region: the name dispute between Macedonia and Greece, the problem between Belgrade and Pristina and the internal organisation of BiH.
Bojan Maricic, executive director of the Macedonian Center for European Training, said that this is the first summit since the Union conference in Thessaloniki in 2003 that has focused on the major issues in the region and set an agenda for action.
“This is something we have long waited to do because there was no long-term plan for the western Balkans. I see this conference as one of hope and a positive signal for the EU’s policy towards the Balkans,” Maricic told SETimes.