The Western Balkans between the EU, NATO, Russia and China
In the Western Balkans, Russia has successfully encouraged resistance to further NATO expansion. China is also making inroads, creating new financial and economic dependencies that complicate the EU accession processes. Further transformation of the region depends on the EU’s ability to intensify dialogue with candidate countries on mid-term achievable objectives, as Henrik Larsen contends in this CSS Analysis.
Twenty years after the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the Western Balkans remains only partially integrated into the Western security and economic structures. Today, it is a region in which NATO and the EU compete for influence alongside Russia and China. While NATO may have carried out its last enlargement with the accession of North Macedonia this year, Russia successfully encouraged Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina not to pursue similar ambitions. The overall decline in democratic standards in the region over the past decade has slowed its integration into the EU, ceding the short-term initiative to China and its growing economic influence.