If one is to believe Serbia’s infamous government-sponsored tabloids, the country is under permanent siege by a plethora of external and internal enemies. Headlines regularly denounce plots by neighbors and by Western countries, which are often alleged to be colluding with the “unpatriotic opposition” to undermine Serbia.
Just across the border in Kosovo, the ruling party’s narrative has been that of an imminent war with Serbia, especially after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and an attempted armed insurgency in the Serbian-majority north in 2023. Government officials and their media proxies have regularly framed the government’s critics—journalists, activists, and prosecutors—as being part of Serbia’s hybrid war against the country.
Rule through fear is neither new nor unique to the Western Balkans. It has been the political zeitgeist in the region for a while, in part because there have long been valid reasons to be fearful.
The region continues to have an unresolved security architecture, with most of its countries still limping toward European Union (EU) and NATO membership, which were supposed to make its contested borders irrelevant. Insecurity about the future has paved the way for secessionist ideas to resurface. In 2022, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine sent this anxiety into overdrive, as Moscow actively sought—to no avail—to expand the front and stir trouble in the Balkans, primarily via its allies in Serbia.
Yet these fears also gave regional leaders a useful tool to distract attention from poor governance and to suppress dissent. For Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who has pursued a policy of hedging between Moscow and the West, the threat of regional destabilization also serves as a bargaining chip with the latter.
Nevertheless, there are hopeful signs that people in the Western Balkans, as well as Western decision makers dealing with the region, are no longer buying into this blackmail. Throughout the region, leaders seem less able to distract their citizens from socioeconomic concerns. At the same time, the EU seems to be learning not to engage with regional troublemakers from a position of fear. Indeed, Brussels has shown that it has ample geopolitical and economic leverage to press its concerns on domestic reforms, Russia policy, and regional stability to Western Balkan nations while working to integrate them into the bloc.
Diminishing returns
The current wave of student protests in Serbia against government corruption has been the most successful and sustained opposition movement against Vučić so far. This is despite attempts to discredit the protests as sparked or supported by foreign governments. The demonstrations clearly have the government worried, as indicated by the resignation of Vučić ’s appointed prime minister. A recent poll by CRTA—a prominent pro-democracy nongovernmental organization in the country—shows that 61 percent of citizens support the protests and two-thirds believe corruption to be the country’s main problem.
In Kosovo, which holds national elections on February 9, the decision by popular Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s ruling party to run entirely on a “sovereignist” agenda with the nationalist slogan “from corner to corner”—highlighting its crackdown on Serbia’s structures in the north of Kosovo—and attacking his critics as unpatriotic, may turn out to be slightly backfiring. The two leading opposition parties, which are running on platforms emphasizing economic issues, seem to be having enough of a resurgence to complicate Kurti’s ability to form a government.
To be sure, there are still real risks of violent escalation due to miscalculation, and some degree of public angst about the potential for war remains prevalent in the region. A November 2024 regional Securimeter poll by the Regional Cooperation Council, an intergovernmental body, shows that while concern about war may be low in Kosovo (only 21 percent of citizens), it remains high in Serbia as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, where more than half of those polled say they are concerned about a war breaking out. Yet region-wide, security concerns remain dwarfed by socioeconomic ones: the same poll shows poverty (49 percent), corruption (48 percent), and depopulation (36 percent) as being the top three priority concerns regionally. On top of that, a staggering 77 percent of respondents in the region identified the high cost of living and inflation as the main economic concern, followed by low wages (55 percent).
A position of strength
Part of the reason why fearmongering may no longer be paying political dividends in deflecting from citizens’ economic concerns is that, with time, the security threats have run out of credibility. Russia has failed to project meaningful power beyond its efforts in Ukraine. The West, for all its faults in mishandling the Western Balkans’ accession into the EU, proved it has the leverage and instruments for deterrence in the region. Indeed, NATO is present both within the region and around it, the EU is by far the region’s biggest trade and investment partner, and US and EU sanctions against Western Balkan nations can bite.
An attempt by Serbs in northern Kosovo to start an armed insurgency in October 2023 was quashed within a day by Kosovo’s Special Police, which was aided by NATO peacekeepers. Milorad Dodik, president of the Serb-majority Republika Srpska entity in Bosnia, has backed off his regular threats to secede from the country whenever he was threatened. Over the past year, Vučić was forced to admit that his hedging space has shrunk: Serbia purchased French warplanes, granted the EU access to its lithium resources, and now is being forced to nationalize its oil and gas industry from US-sanctioned Gazprom.
The West no longer seems to need to negotiate with Vučić from a position of fear—that is, treading carefully due to a concern that the Serbian president will turn further toward Russia or cause regional instability. Despite Vučić’s latest pro-Western moves, the European Council recently decided to keep Serbia’s accession talks effectively frozen due to concerns about democracy, relations with Kosovo, and nonalignment with the EU’s Russia policy.
This tougher stance on Serbia is a welcome departure from overly cautious EU policy toward the Western Balkans for the last ten years. While the EU has been right to fear that failing to integrate the Western Balkans would leave the bloc less secure, it was wrong to be afraid to dictate accession terms to Balkan nations given the EU’s leverage over the region.
Fear had driven the EU’s thinking about Western Balkan countries’ accession for most of the past decade. Some members were worried about the EU’s ability to absorb more Eastern countries with questionable governance standards and security postures. The EU’s far right also fueled xenophobia about the region’s Muslim-majority countries. As a result, the Western Balkans was parked in an effective containment policy, which empowered authoritarians who showed they could at least keep the peace.
Yet, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the fears of bringing the region into the EU were dwarfed by fears of keeping it out. Gray zones like the Western Balkans turned out to be a security vulnerability. There is a growing recognition within the EU that it needs to bring the Western Balkans into the bloc. However, this is coupled with an awareness that Brussels can afford to make demands of aspiring members if their accession prospects are to progress. Reflecting this balance, the new momentum for EU enlargement has now opened a window for at least Montenegro and Albania—the countries with the least amount of obstacles to membership and which are undertaking some reforms—to be part of the next accession wave.
The Western Balkans’ peace and stability will, however, remain fragile for as long as its countries remain stuck in bilateral or identitarian disputes. But over the past few years, the EU has shown that it has the leverage to resolve the disputes that stand in the region’s way. The Western Balkans present the ultimate litmus test of the bloc’s geopolitical weight. Going forward, the EU should use the leverage at its disposal without allowing fearmongering from Western Balkan leaders to deter it from its efforts to bring the region into its fold.
Agon Maliqi is an independent researcher and political analyst from Pristina, Kosovo. He was the co-founder and longtime editor of Sbunker, a think tank and blog on Western Balkans affairs, as well as a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
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The Western Balkans stands at the nexus of many of Europe’s critical challenges. Some, if not all, of the countries of the region may soon join the European Union and shape the bloc’s ability to become a more effective geopolitical player. At the same time, longstanding disputes in the region, coupled with institutional weaknesses, will continue to pose problems and present a security vulnerability for NATO that could be exploited by Russia or China. The region is also a transit route for westward migration, a source of critical raw materials, and an important node in energy and trade routes. The BalkansForward column will explore the key strategic dynamics in the region and how they intersect with broader European and transatlantic goals.
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