Futures of the Western Balkans: Fragmentation and Integration in the Region and Beyond (SpringerBriefs in Political Science) 3030896277, 9783030896270

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

Marco Zoppi

Futures of the Western Balkans Fragmentation and Integration in the Region and Beyond 123

SpringerBriefs in Political Science

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Marco Zoppi

Futures of the Western Balkans Fragmentation and Integration in the Region and Beyond

Marco Zoppi Department of Political and Social Sciences University of Bologna Bologna, Italy

ISSN 2191-5466     ISSN 2191-5474 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Political Science ISBN 978-3-030-89627-0    ISBN 978-3-030-89628-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89628-7 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my wife Sonia

Preface

I first came to think about an interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial book about the Western Balkans in early 2020, when I was working on and participating in several international projects involving the region. Some of these projects are the two Jean Monnet Research Networks “Democratization and Reconciliation in the Western Balkans” and “BordEUr – new European Borderlands,” and later also the Interreg Adrion-funded project “ReInSer – Refugees’ Economic Integration through Social Entrepreneurship.” The topics of the projects, only apparently different from one another, in reality presented me with overlapping themes and recurring issues pertaining to the political, economic, and social spheres that I found worth exploring in more detail. The simultaneity of the diverse matters has led me to consider new paths to describe and explain the dynamics we are used to observe as researchers in the region. Following this approach, I have pursued in the book a regional perspective underlining the many challenges and opportunities that the Western Balkan countries have in common, notwithstanding the divisive narratives that tend to emphasize incompatibility and promote mistrust among concerned actors. Through my investigation, I propose instead a vision for the future of the Western Balkans grounded on geopolitical analysis, economic assessments, and statistical evidence – a vision that remains at the margins of current political imaginations, not to mention political initiatives. I hope that my incursion into the present and future of the Western Balkans will result inspiring to readers, and that my approach will likewise reveal useful to put on focus the most important processes involving the region, starting from the prospective accession to the European Union (EU) but extending to intra-regional trade as well as territorial cohesion. I also hope that the book will stimulate further studies on the connections realizing between societal spheres. I am really thankful to all the people and colleagues that I have met in the framework of the international projects mentioned above, and in particular to the research team I have been working with since 2017 in the Department of Political Science at

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the University of Bologna. Our conversations and reflections have been of great inspiration for writing this book. I would like to express my gratitude also to Springer and to Lorraine Klimowich in particular for their interest in publishing this book. Monteodorisio, Italy August 14, 2021

Marco Zoppi

Introduction The European Space: Mending Old Rips While Facing New Divisions

Exactly thirty years ago, the armed conflict in Slovenia and Croatia marked the beginning of the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation. The tragic events that followed would cause a large wave of material and moral destruction, leading to a humanitarian crisis that has shocked European public opinion and the world. The war years, in fact, were characterized by extensive violations of fundamental human rights as well as of social, cultural, and religious rights. In the same year, 1991, Albania would hold the first democratic elections in its history, after the end of the isolationist communist regime that had lasted for forty years: by the time of the vote, thousands of Albanian citizens had already arrived in Greece and Italy, fleeing the disastrous domestic economic situation. Thirty years later, only some of the scars left by the war have been healed, and the region has not yet managed to completely shake off the narratives of fragmentation often employed by external observers to describe it. Such views have precise historical roots, tracing back to the beginning of the previous century when the Balkans were represented as Europe’s “powder keg”, due to their alleged inclination toward nationalism and war. The violent episodes of the 1990s and early 2000s have contributed to the record of distorted depictions of the area, still seen as extremely volatile and a land of “barbarity” (Todorova, 2009, 139). Over time, the Balkans have thus come to epitomize the idea of political and territorial fragmentation par excellence – a perceived threat that today keeps haunting as a ghost EU members and institutions, which are struggling to decide on the timing and modalities of their future accession in the Union. In fact, the region is also engaged in a converse process, the integration in the EU, which in order to be attained requires political stability, dispute settlement with neighbors, and convergence on a number of aspects. Being a target for enlargement, the entire region has thus entered the sphere of EU political interests, under the specific label of “Western Balkans”, which I also use in this book. The Western Balkans (WB) are currently composed of six countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. With the exception of Albania, all of the above once formed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in union with present-day Croatia and Slovenia, until the dissolution ix

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starting in 1991 and the war that subsequently afflicted the region. The divisive legacy of the recent past is still visible within and between Balkan states, in the way in which many political narratives and positions are still very busy with inspecting and (re-)interpreting the past, while any political efforts toward present and future challenges remain rather blurry and underdeveloped. Reconciliation, border disputes, and inter-ethnic relations are still unsettled questions: this prevents alternative visions of the Balkans from emerging. On their part, EU institutions and members have also contributed to making the WB’s path to Europe unpredictable. In this sense, a quite interesting phase of the enlargement process took place at the end of 2019: in October, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands took the lead in blocking the opening of the accession negotiations for Albania and North Macedonia (European Parliament, 2018). As a result, the European Union temporarily dashed the possibility of opening the accession talks, creating disappointment in the two targeted countries and for many fellow Union members enthusiastic about speeding up the enlargement process. France, in particular, has vetoed the talks on enlargements on the grounds that the EU needs to reform internally first, before taking any further steps toward broadening the EU family. This reveals that the EU zone is also traversed by relevant political challenges, stemming primarily from the complex diplomatic management of some remarkable events occurring in the last decade or so: the Great Recession, the mass migration flows in the Mediterranean and along the Balkan Route, and the global Covid-19 pandemic. Political fragmentation in the EU directly affects the enlargement process. The 2019 impasse was temporarily overcome in March 2020, when the EU’s main institutions gave the green light to open the accession talks for the two countries (Council of the EU 2020). But in November, another issue crept up in the process, when the Bulgarian government imposed a new veto, on North Macedonia only. Officially, Sofia is seeking an acknowledgment that the language spoken in the neighboring country is not “Macedonian”, but rather a derivation of Bulgarian language. This move appears to be part of a broader wave of discontent in Sofia with the way in which historical connections with Bulgaria would be downplayed by the North Macedonian government. This discontent has created a stalemate in the accession talks, and what was in principle a step toward integration has created new motives for divisions, and may lead to the decoupling of the accession talks to move forward with Albania at least, as recently affirmed by the Enlargement Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi (Zsiros & Somerville, 2021). That was not the first time that the agenda on the Western Balkans’ accession to the EU had been derailed, or required striking a compromise between divergent political opinions. The enlargement fatigue and the effects of continued delays in EU accession talks should not be overlooked and are a reminder that the entire European space ultimately rests on a fluid magma of fragmentation, as we shall see better in the next section. With a bit of irony one could even note that the EU veto decision may have done more than expected in bringing the Western Balkan countries closer to the Union. In fact, three WB countries have responded to the veto with the launch of a “mini-Schengen” proposal (later rebranded as “Open Balkan”), a counter-reaction directed at fostering regional cooperation: the initiative aims at

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removing visa requirements as well as obstacles to trade of goods and services, eventually realizing regional collaboration plans that have remained only on paper for several years – with Brussels’ blessing. The Open Balkan, which at the time of writing has just been officially established, has nevertheless also triggered tensions in the region due to intersecting, long-standing political matters: the pending question of Kosovo’s international recognition and the potential overlapping of Open Balkan with pre-existing EU instruments for cooperation have prevented the participation of all six Western Balkan countries (WB6). Therefore, what is in principle an initiative for more regional integration risks transforming itself into a global showcase for the degree of division and uncertainty still experienced in the Balkans. I believe that this is not surprising: fragmentation and integration are indeed the two poles between which the Western Balkans seem to be swinging like a pendulum, and through which I argue that we may seek explanations for many contemporary, apparently puzzling dynamics occurring in the region at the political, economic, and social level. The Western Balkans appear on one hand to be on the way to achieving stabilization, and on the other to be inexorably divided internally and hence a threat to regional and European security. Pushes toward fragmentation and integration interchange continuously, depending on the process, the actors involved, and the interests at stake. Therefore, I use the analytical tool composed of the just mentioned duo, fragmentation and integration, through the portmanteau word “intragmentation”: my approach reveals that intragmentation relies upon the synergy of different factors, and that the further stabilization of the region requires integrated efforts and more cooperation for the mutual benefit of all regional actors. For this reason, my analysis is necessarily cross-sectoral, and focused on identifying common regional challenges. In fact, the identification of common patterns makes it possible to disentangle complexity and highlight commonalities and differences in a number of simultaneous dynamics currently characterizing the WB region. In particular, I focus predominantly but not exclusively on the so-called Europeanization process, on market and trade, and on socio-demographic transformations, three key issues within the political, economic, and social spheres. I suggest that what deserves major analytical attention is the interconnectedness of these various processes on the one hand, and the simultaneousness of integration/ disintegration pushes in each of them on the other. I also believe that this represents a more innovative approach than dealing with political, economic, and social implications on their own without highlighting connections. If we learn how to navigate the duality of intragmentation, we may be able to shift narratives and imaginations from the past to the future, as the title of this book suggests. In fact, the process of identification of common challenges is simultaneously also an incursion into the future, namely in the space where we project possible developments and solutions on present hurdles. At the policy level as well, overcoming obstacles requires awareness and willingness to shift the course of present actions in a new direction. I argue that this kind of perspective is somewhat left behind in most academic and non-academic debates surrounding the Western Balkans. I find that most of the recent academic production dealing with the area tends to focus on highly specific

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topics. On the one hand, this may be recognized as the positive result of the degree of specialization reached in academic studies and as a just retreat from overly generalizing accounts. On the other hand, this specialization risks losing the attention on broader processes involving the whole region, well beyond country specificities. The immediate result of this trend – as noted above – is the meager availability of political science research addressing the interconnected dynamics existing between different societal realms (e.g., political, economic, and social), something that can also be of more direct use for policymaking in the region and beyond. It is contended that such an approach is needed in order to evaluate essential regional aspects (e.g., EU accession, regional reconciliation) against a number of old and new challenges such as depopulation, feeble regional trade, and not least political crises in Europe. In the regional context of the Western Balkans, “future” is not an easy concept to deploy. In fact, the end of socialism, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and the ensuing wars have left a legacy of divisions that keeps being replicated at both narrative and institutional level, especially via constructions and instrumental uses of the past. Since in these societies the memory of the past is still a highly contested field, the idea of the future remains at the margins of political planning and imaginations. This book will aim at overcoming the backward-looking prism connected to the traumatic regional past via the analysis of processes whose transformative power is yet to be fully explored and assessed. I will clarify two important points. First, this book is not about war-related issues stricto sensu. The repercussions of the war for the post-socialist transition to democracy and for current intra-regional relations will, however, be echoed and carefully taken into account. After all, it is quite an impossible task to describe contemporary political, economic, and social dynamics without including in the picture the war – and everything that has happened since (Bianchini, 2003, 8). I suggest, though, to turn the tables and look at things differently, shedding light on the common challenges and opportunities faced by the six Western Balkan countries, both as a way to open a new window of analysis on the region as a whole and also to underline how similar they are to those faced by European Union countries. Second, I stress that a prominent feature of my analysis is that I see the Western Balkans as an embedded region of the European space. The very terminology in use here, the “Western Balkans”, is not itself neutral but delineates a quite specific geopolitical concept: the group of Southeast European countries that are not yet EU members (Meka & Bianchini, 2020, 9).1 For all these countries, the year 2025 has been put forward as the date for their potential accession to the EU. In other words, the very designation of the region as the Western Balkans conveys the sense of the strong EU interest in it. And also the sense of something transitory: it’s an EU-led “project” that ends at the exact time when the last country of the group will have joined the European Union. At that point, these countries will perhaps become known in common parlance as Southeast European or Adriatic-Ionian members 1  At the time of writing, Albania, the Republic of North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia have the status of candidate EU countries. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are instead potential candidates. See also Chap. 1.

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together with other EU countries, or as something similar. But other non-EU global powers, as we shall see, use instead different terminologies which draw alternative regional visions. Thus, I find it important to emphasize from the very start where the book stands with reference to geopolitical perspectives: I deliberately locate the futures of the region predominantly in Europe, as Europe. This is not just the outcome of the author’s own background or thinking, but it will be shown in what terms the Western Balkans already forms part of the same political, economic, and social dynamics, thus shaping a broader European “space” within which a range of matters can be studied for their common implications. As part and parcel of the same idea, I will also reflect on both country-specific and regional issues that are more or less connected to EU accession, ranging from the “pathological” effects of Europeanization, to the development of a center-periphery type of socio-economic relations (Mendelski, 2016). I likewise recognize that the accession process will remain central for EU– Western Balkans relations: surveys conducted in the region indicate in fact that in these societies the EU is constantly part of speculations about the future, and that positive views of EU membership are also on the rise in countries that have been more skeptical in the past, such as Montenegro and Serbia (Gallup, 2010, 2016; see also IRI, 2020).2 However, not all evidence points to the same direction. More generally, in fact, I identify a complex, non-linear dialectic in the relation between EU and Western Balkan countries, with the former changing its attitude toward enlargement at different points in time, and the latter growing disillusioned about (but rarely against) EU integration and its actual benefits (cf. Belloni, 2020, 136). Public opinion in a number of EU countries (especially in Germany, Austria, France, and the Netherlands) remains rather skeptical of further enlargement, often more so when fears of intensified migration and security concerns are on the rise (Tcherneva, 2019). The EU is the actor that has invested the most in the region politically, and the one that has emphasized more than any other actor  – although with mixed results – the importance of achieving democratization, reconciliation, and the fight against corruption, issues largely perceived as crucial in the whole region. These are prerequisites to access the EU, and thus work as a condition for EU integration. By the same token, the Western Balkans, located as they are at the fringes of the EU, will provide an opportunity to ascertain the meaning of a possible scale-down in the EU’s normative power, for these countries have embarked on a complex process of democratization that will ideally end with EU membership. Despite its flaws, and not least delays, I argue that the prospect of EU accession remains the 2  Between 2010 and 2016, in Montenegro the respondents in favor of EU membership increased from 44% to 49% of the total, and in Serbia, from 25% to 40%. In the other countries, a large majority upheld the membership idea in both surveys. Cf. https://news.gallup.com/poll/213899/ western-balkans-benefit-joining.aspx. See also Ivlevs and King 2019. Similar results are also reported in the recent Balkan Barometer (2019, 37). In the survey commissioned by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in early 2020, participants were asked how they would vote in a referendum on their country joining the EU: 93% of respondents in Kosovo answered positively, that is, join; 76% did so in Bosnia and Herzegovina; 74% in North Macedonia; 63% in Montenegro; and 50% in Serbia (IRI, 2020, 79).

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best available, and the most ambitious, political project for settling open issues in the region, for supporting initiatives aimed at achieving long-term political stability, and for coping with globalization challenges. What are the plausible alternatives? While we ultimately can’t be sure of how further EU enlargement will take place, we know that it will have to overcome Europe’s current political divide, which is the focus of the next section.

From the Great Recession to the Global Pandemic The last fifteen years in the history of Europe have been characterized by quite remarkable, and to some extent unthinkable, socio-political developments that seem to be challenging the geopolitical role usually associated with the continent (Bakardjieva Engelbrekt et al., 2020). Europe’s most important political supranational creature, the European Union, appears engulfed and worn out by the internal divisions emerging around various core matters. The latter include, for example, the pace of enlargement; the establishment of mechanisms for the redistribution of asylum seekers among member states; the Brexit affair; and again the strenuous path to the approval of “Next Generation EU”, the recovery package assisting member states to deal with the economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. In these and possibly other respects the EU’s path toward a response has often been disordered – even when eventually effective – with the result of projecting the image of scarce political cohesion. It does not help that externally the EU is confronted by a climate of deteriorated cooperation as well as enhanced rivalries between international powers such as the USA (especially during the Trump administration), China, and Russia, which minimizes the chances to realize consensus on key global issues (Mearsheimer, 2019; Lucarelli, 2020). While at first glance this situation might be understood as a mere question of geopolitics and reduced soft power, the effects of the EU’s perceived idleness involve more than just that. The waning of what has been termed the “normative” power of the EU is indeed capable of undermining the stability of the entire European space (Manners, 2002). Even more so in the present global political context, in which democracy is considered to be “in retreat” almost everywhere and where we observe a proliferation of state and non-state actors that do not include democratization in their agendas, or that criticize the very notion of democracy in favor of less egalitarian forms of rule (Freedom House, 2019). As one crucial actor of the liberal world order, the EU has instead directly and indirectly favored peace and stability, and has actively spread its own understanding of democracy within and without the borders of the Union. These efforts are particularly visible in the area that is the object of special attention in this book: the six countries composing the Western Balkans. Let me now take one step back to clarify when the current fragmentation tendency in Europe began. There is good reason to reconnect its origin back to the “Great Recession”, the economic downturn initiated with the bursting of the

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housing bubble in the USA in 2006, and more specifically to the eurozone crisis that followed (Zoppi, 2020). This event, it is argued here, triggered a series of developments displaying a common denominator, political fragmentation, which would also manifest in territorial reconfigurations of power. At the dawn of the spreading financial crisis, the European Union found itself divided between “debtor” and “creditor” members, while public opinions and debates polarized around perceptions of a “German-run” Europe on the one hand, and fiscally irresponsible Southern European countries on the other (Matthijs, 2014). Some of the decisions taken in those days would profoundly affect the sense of EU solidarity, as was the case with the much-disputed Troika austerity measures in exchange for emergency funds lending. Besides the effects connected to the ensuing sovereign debt crisis, the eurozone was and still is characterized by important disequilibria that have “a domestic endogenous nature linked to long-lasting structural asymmetries between peripheral and central economies” (Botta, 2014). These asymmetries concern productive and export structures as much as divergences among EU members enhanced by the euro’s institutional design, eventually hampering efforts to counter country-specific shocks (Matthijs, 2014; Hermann, 2014; Guiso et al., 2019). Therefore, the unfolding of the events in the EU quickly made the management of the crisis the epicenter of Brussels’ political efforts, sacrificing attention to other matters, such as enlargement. However, despite the internal pressure on sovereign debt, the EU could not avoid confronting in the coming years a number of other crucial challenges for territorial cohesion in the European space. In fact, in 2014 Russian troops invaded the Crimean Peninsula, beginning a series of proxy military confrontations with Ukraine that have not yet ceased at the time of writing this book. The annexation of Crimea represents a clear “breach of the security order in Europe” (Bakardjieva Engelbrekt et al., 2020, 8). In the same way, the EU has also demonstrated shortcomings in promoting democracy in Ukraine since 2010, contributing to the standoff in mutual relations (Samokhvalov, 2017; Privitera, 2018). Many observers have noted that Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence has provided Russia with a precedent in terms of international relations and international law that proved instrumental to pursuing its goal in Ukraine: protecting Russian-speaking populations while containing the EU and NATO’s expansion, considered to be illegitimate (cf. van den Driestm, 2015; Baranovsky, 2016). In the same year, flows of asylum seekers and economic migrants started to transit en masse across the so-called Balkan Route to reach EU countries, as a consequence of the tragic end of the “Arab Spring”, the Syrian civil war, and previous political turmoil in the Middle East. The number of people attempting to enter the EU from the east surpassed that of migrants crossing the Mediterranean on inflatable boats, reaching a peak in the number of arrivals in 2015. In lieu of the missing EU-concerned solution, member countries individually addressed the need to manage these flows with the erection of fences, walls, physical pushbacks, terrestrial and marine patrols, political reforms, the implementation of quotas on asylum requests accepted, and other measures that changed considerably intra- and inter-­ society relations in Europe. Populism, anti-EU sentiment, and xenophobia have

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flourished throughout the continent, realizing worrisome ideological alliances, while a cleavage between solidaristic and securitarian approaches to migration developed. Some member states, in particular the block of Višegrad countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), have opposed Brussels’ policy on asylum seekers and migrants, opening yet another fracture line in the EU. At the same time, they improved their cooperation with the Western Balkan countries on the themes of defense and police collaboration with reference to migration flows (Juzová et al., 2019: 5). Mass migration along the Balkan Route has thus given new centrality to the region, specifically emphasizing the security dimension. While migration has remained a hot topic since, the June 2016 referendum in the United Kingdom officially kicked off another stark example of territorial and ideological reconfiguration in the European space: the Brexit drama. In many ways, the Brexit vote came at the peak of a process of externalization of responsibility for internal economic conditions, which saw the EU as the main actor to blame: it has been argued that Brexit, as experienced also elsewhere, brought on the scene the revolt of “the ignored”, the “left-behind”, and “the marginalized” in the common fight against the elites, the establishment, the banks, and the multinationals (Buckledee, 2018). By the same token, Brexit also revealed other driving factors, and in particular London’s desire to resume and champion free, multilateral trade with old and new partners (UK government, 2019). While it is not my task to enter into the details of Brexit’s accounts, it is important to underline that with it the EU has certainly lost one of its most convinced pro-enlargement members. Quite ironically, just two years before Brexit, the EU had discouraged Scotland from asserting its intention to become independent in the referendum held in 2014, while Brussels is now boosting a second referendum winking to Scottish premier Nicola Sturgeon. Not by chance had the EU and especially Spain stood against the hypothesis of an independent Scotland in 2014. In fact, Basque and Catalonia’s drive for independence is forcing Spain to play cautiously with similar instances around the globe. Emblematically, Spain’s then foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, on the eve of the Scottish referendum, commented that “it would start a process of Balkanisation that nobody in Europe wants” (Kassam & Traynor, 2014, my emphasis). The wording is not accidental. The linkages emerged clearly with the Catalan independence referendum (October 2017), which provides yet another case to appreciate the centrifugal trend spreading across Europe. This centrifugal force, from the Latin centrifugus, “to flee the centre”, in the two instances of popular vote just mentioned means unequivocally fleeing Brussels (Brexit) and Madrid (Catalonia). Spain’s 2017 Hot Fall was not spared moments of high tension, such as the harsh intervention of the police in the attempt to disrupt voting as well as the arrest warrants issued against pro-­ independence leaders. These protests echoed the meaning that the foreign minister had intended a few years earlier when he referred to Balkanization. Catalonia is exactly the reason inhibiting Spain from recognizing Kosovo’s independence. The leaders of Kosovo have nevertheless rejected the troublesome analogy between the two cases, condensed in the slogan “Kosovo is not Catalonia”. From Ukraine to

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Catalonia, the issue of Kosovo’s independence surfaces again in the account of desegregation tendencies occurring in what I call the European space. The emergency brought by the Covid-19 pandemic spreading in early 2020 has also spurred divisions, this time around the economic recovery measures to be implemented. Narratives of debt and creditor states surfaced again, due to the propensity of some members (e.g., Austria, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands) to resort to “corona bonds”, namely to a mutualized, collective debt sustained by the European Investment Bank (Euronews, 2020). Moreover, the pandemic emergency has stimulated both new streams of solidarity and circles of mis-information about alleged lack of solidarity and support among EU members and their continental neighbors and prospective fellow members. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić at one point defined EU solidarity as a “fairy tale” because it was allegedly not capable of providing medical assistance, which the country instead promptly received from China. However, if the EU as a whole was often made the object of criticism, there have been multiple solidarity initiatives from both sides: for example, Albania sent a team of 30 doctors and nurses to Italy to support that country in the pandemic emergency and this was followed a few weeks later by the shipment of medical equipment from Belgrade to Rome. In 2020, the EU mobilized a package of over €3.3 billion in favor of WB countries, and in 2021 Brussels started sending vaccine doses to WB countries. Serbia, which had ordered vaccines from both east and west, shared part of the doses with citizens of neighboring countries. Future analyses will reveal how these and other examples of “coronavirus diplomacy”, against the background of the massive health and economic emergency, have contributed to mending or exacerbating divisions within and between countries in the European space.

A Variety of Tensions in the Western Balkans In the face of the multiple fragmentation lines traversing Europe, the stereotypical construction of the Western Balkans that aims to keep it perpetually divided and volatile seems to lose its traditional appeal (Simić, 2013).3 In the last decade, the

3  This is in reality a simplification of the much more complex process of stereotyping construction of the Balkans, primarily as the Europe’s “other”. What sort of other? Todorova (2009, 3) has provided a good summarization in the following lines: “the ‘Balkanization’ not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian. In its latest hypostasis, particularly in American academe, it has been completely decontextualized and paradigmatically related to a variety of problems. That the Balkans have been described as the ‘other’ of Europe does not need special proof. What has been emphasized about the Balkans is that its inhabitants do not care to conform to the standards of behavior devised as normative by and for the civilized world”. I believe that such stereotypes act in at least two complementary ways: on the one hand, they emphasize the notion of the area being an “ethnic powderkeg” (Marinov, 2013, 9), much in line with what is argued by Todorova. On the other hand, the multiple constructions of the Balkans often fail to reflect on the historical involvement of foreign powers – and the role of the world order equilibria –

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region has not been immune to some remarkable political processes. To start with, the political map of the region itself is still in the making: it should be recalled here that it was just in 2006 that Montenegro separated from Serbia after years of increasing alienation from Belgrade. In 2008, Kosovo unilaterally seceded from Serbia, dividing both regional and EU countries on the thorny issue of recognition. The North Macedonian and Greek governments settled the dispute over the official name of the former country only in June 2018, sealed with the Prespa/Prespes agreement. This has eased the tensions that until then had risked affecting the entire region, due to internal and external factors, as we shall see in Chap. 1 (Georgievski & Pandeva, 2020, 3). However, the agreement was also the result of a pragmatic move, since solving the name issue was known as the conditio sine qua non for opening negotiation talks for NATO and the EU. To achieve this, Skopje had to give up on its policy of nation-building rooted in Ancient Macedonia and in Alexander the Great. Due to these identity implications, the agreement falls short of popular legitimacy. One opinion piece noted, for example, that “The Prespa agreement is legally binding (…) Institutions are bound by international legislation. Individuals can do and say what they want. There is no reason to expect that to change. Any nationalist hothead will keep on like they used to [i.e., using the name they wish]” (Fotakis, 2019). This is a general issue in the Western Balkans, where the gap between any issue settlement and its societal reception may act as a hotbed for ethnic and cultural rivalries. In a similar vein, Bulgaria has entered into a dispute with North Macedonia over history, identity, and language, which is currently blocking the start of the EU accession talks after Skopje had already faced France’s veto, as mentioned earlier. In April 2021, the online appearance of the so-called Balkan non-paper (of unknown origin) came to the fore in debates, generating a wave of criticism and harsh reactions by all regional and EU leaders. The document suggests the dissolution of Bosnia and Herzegovina (creating a Greater Croatia with parts of Herzegovina; a greater Serbia with parts of Republika Srpska; and a separate Bosniak state) as well as the unification of Albania and Kosovo. While the plan has been regarded from Brussels to Moscow as extremely dangerous for peace equilibria in the area, and its further discussion appears rather unlikely, the reactions it has managed to trigger show that borders and states in the Western Balkans are still debatable and vulnerable to potential “spoilers” wishing to undermine integration efforts. In addition to the above cases, the region is in fact still marked by open bilateral issues, which include border demarcation, the recognition of minority rights, the recognition of churches, and last but not least diverging historical narratives and practices of memorialization of the past.4 The cases of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo stand out as especially critical for regional cohesion: the former is a in shaping the political contours of the region and in fostering animosities within it (Simić, 2013; Ortakovski, 2013). 4  See the special issue of the Nationalities Papers titled “Collective Memories and Legacies of Political Violence in the Balkans”: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/ issue/65DE723665BD0FF876074F63A22D9360.

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­ ultinational community with scarce horizontal loyalty at the state level, where the m international peacebuilding efforts have not delivered what they promised in full. Kosovo still does not enjoy universal international recognition, and its ethnic Albanian citizens present strong attachments to Tirana which are often perceived as potentially destabilizing. The impression is that many of the regional disputes still have a long road ahead before being finally settled, and before being digested by concerned societies. Sport has recently given several examples to appreciate this. The most emblematic case occurred in October 2014: during a football match between Serbia and Albania held in Belgrade, a drone suddenly appeared on the pitch. It was trailing a flag displaying a map of “Greater Albania”, which also includes Serbia within its alleged borders. Reactions were highly emblematic of the inherent tensions, as players on the two national teams scrambled to take the flag while fans became more and more ignited by the minute. The incident was commented on harshly by virtually all political elites in the two countries.5 It was not an isolated occasion: during the June 2018 football match between Switzerland and Serbia (ended 2-1) the celebration of the two scorers of the former team became a political case since both, having Kosovar roots, did the “eagle gesture” (a reference to the Albanian ethnicity, frequently displayed by Kosovar athletes in sport events). In January 2020, Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic’s celebration for winning the ATP Cup in Australia, which involved the singing of Serbian patriotic songs that were reportedly also sung by ultranationalist Serbian forces during the break-up of Yugoslavia, caused the reaction of Kosovo’s ambassador to Bulgaria, Edon Cana. The latter called the tennis player a “primitive, backward and ordinary Balkan nationalist and chauvinist”.6 The variety of tensions one can perceive in the Western Balkans also includes the 2015 shootout in Kumanovo, North Macedonia; the coup d’état plot foiled in Montenegro in 2016, which led to the arrest and indictment of 14 people, including two leaders of the Montenegrin opposition and two Russian nationals. Or again, the arm wrestling initiated in late 2019 by the Montenegrin President Milo Đukanović with the Serbian Orthodox Church in the country, accused of exerting pressure and interference, and also threatening to the Montenegrin sense of identity (Kajosevic, 2020). These and other events demonstrate the transformative power of unresolved conflicts and the overall lack of reconciliation in the region.

5  In particular, for the Serbian Ministry of Affairs it was an “unprecedented provocation on a football pitch and must have been planned in advance, so that there can be no doubt that it was not a spontaneous incident provoked by hooligans. It was a premeditated political provocation intended to cause disorders in Belgrade that would cast a shadow over the fact that Serbia has been very successfully developing and fostering cooperation in the region”. The complete statement is accessible at the following link: http://www.mfa.gov.rs/en/statements-archive/statements-archive-2014/ 13586-statement-of-the-ministry-of-foreign-affairs-regarding-the-incidents-­­at-the-serbia-albaniafootball-match. 6  See the original tweet here: https://twitter.com/edoncana/status/1216415508850933761.

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Finally, in this brief overview, we shall not forget that Western Balkan citizens have gone out into the street to protest en masse. Starting from Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014, citizens have repeatedly confronted tear gas, water cannons, and batons in all the six regional countries to voice disapproval against the economic conditions, corruption, and violence in their country’s politics – in what has been called the “Balkan spring” (Birn, 2020). In fact, the ethno-political frictions and the high corruption levels within these territories delay the accession process, as full democratization remains unaccomplished across the region. At the same time, the state of things reveals the weariness of the EU in spreading its basic values of democracy, rule of law, and human rights, and in promoting itself convincingly as a successful case of integration and mediation of disputes (Coletti, 2018, 7).

 etween Fragmentation and Integration: “Intragmentation” B as a Method Considering the explanatory potential that I attach to fragmentation and integration processes in the European space, it is important now to give more thought about what I have termed “intragmentation”. I argue that this portmanteau word helps us to capture the dynamic of mutual reinforcement between the two, and to promptly remind us that the study of aggregative forces should be complemented by the analysis of its disintegrating counterpart, and vice versa. In underlining the works of intragmentation in the three chapters of this book, a number of features of this dynamic will emerge. I should start, however, from a brief focus on “fragmentation” alone, since it is usually attributed a negative connotation. In terms of the effects of the rising global consciousness, we tend to understand states and societies as pieces of the global space and porous to transnational forces, rather than as distinct entities well entrenched within national borders. Many everyday dynamics in fact involve the movement of people, goods, services, and capital across states and continents, and the march of connectivity suggests that the world is bound to be progressively integrated in supranational entities, in the global market and also at the territorial level, via modern infrastructures and faster transportation means. In this context, fragmentation is often primarily seen as an instance of interruption of such imagined and practiced continuity or linearity. As such, it is something (a social force, a demo-territorial feature, or a political decision) that interposes itself in the between and prevents or obstructs in various ways the achievement of the unitary goal. Parag Khanna (2016, 63), from a geopolitical point of view, defines devolution as “the perpetual fragmentation of territory into ever more (and smaller) units of authority, from empires to nations, nations to provinces, and provinces to cities”. He even associates devolution with greater political stability, as it brings political power closer to those polities claiming it. In fact, we should not consider fragmentation as bad in itself. It has assumed a specific negative connotation because

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we live in an era that glorifies the power of connected markets, and in which integration at all levels has been emphasized as the ultimate winning strategy: think about the “triumph of the city” as innovative and productive pole compared to dispersed places (Glaeser, 2011); or about the centrality enjoyed by urban areas in the implementation of policies and development strategies. Within this conceptual framework, fragmentation is often reduced to being considered merely a case of “failed” integration. However, we should not forget that integration efforts also contribute to producing and reproducing fragmentation: the growth of economic poles in fact creates new economic peripheries as investments, wealth, and infrastructure will concentrate in the former area; similarly, increasing urbanization contributes to depopulating the villages left behind by emigrants seeking better economic and education opportunities. Even Europeanization, a key driver for the EU accession of the WB6, at times fosters unintended, divisive political dynamics: a clear example of this in the Western Balkans is the rise of “stabilitocracy”, namely the government conduct characterized by increasing informal and patronage practices, led by leaders formally claiming to be pro-EU (Kmezić & Bieber, 2017). One of the explanations indicated in the literature is that the EU enlargement process is mainly run as an affair between Brussels and WB regional governments, reducing considerably the space of participation for citizens and bottom-­up initiatives, creating a societal fracture between governing elites on the one hand and parliaments and civil society on the other. When intended politically as devolution of power or even as a claim for the narrower reorganization of the political space, fragmentation does not necessarily carry a negative meaning. When acknowledged and properly addressed, fragmentation can provide a renewed push for more effective integration efforts. When neglected, we may observe instead negative consequences. With respect again to WB–EU relations, this process is well summarized by Bianchini (2020, 145): [The] consistent decline of the EU attractiveness is becoming a discouraging factor. Its potential aggregative role is affected, with negative impacts on a still severely divided region. Consequently, a vicious circle has been created and the room for affirming a maximalist democracy, based on regional cooperation, prospective reconciliation, and inclusiveness within the EU framework is stagnating, while mutual animosities are still in place

This excerpt reflects on the fact that EU integration is also capable of occurring at the expense of internal democratic participation. This in turn generates dissatisfaction, protest, and claims for more shared ownership of the process, which end with either devolution or with more integration initiatives on the part of policymakers, whether at the local, national, or supranational level. In principle, fragmentation can thus also express a need for more participatory policymaking and more equality, and as such anticipate new cohesive measures. Having clarified these important points, I now summarize the main principles behind my understanding of fragmentation. First, aggregation stimulates disaggregation and vice versa. In other words, they are not mutually exclusive forces and for the most part they actually coexist. Think again of the Open Balkan initiative launched by Albania, North Macedonia, and Serbia, which on the one hand is meant

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to prepare the region to play by EU trade and market rules, and on the other hand does not involve all regional countries because Kosovo, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina have claimed to prefer remaining fully focused on joining the EU (more in Chap. 2). In this sense, intragmentation refers in broader terms to the difficult process of having all stakeholders satisfied around a certain issue, as well as to the near impossibility of avoiding “spoiler” actors whose arguments may appear more or less legitimate. Second, intragmentation should be understood as a multi-layered phenomenon that happens on a variety of levels and affects several sectors, including regional political relations, market and trade structures, and territorial cohesion. For example, we can note that the integration of Western Balkan markets and trade structures in those of the EU takes place at a good pace, while intra-regional trade is still poor and even characterized by trade barriers, which reflect the political laceration of the post-Yugoslav economic space. Third, fragmentation does not prevent integration efforts: while borders within the EU are discursively and practically vanishing, the WB6 are still engaged in creating and contesting borders in the region with their neighbors. And while Brussels in principle sustains free movement, it has cooperated intensely with WB6 to ensure the control of the latter’s frontiers and the containment of further movements of migrants and asylum seekers in the aftermath of the 2015 mass migration flows. Despite the apparent contradictions, the management of migration flows has stimulated the close cooperation on security between the EU and the WB, notably with the externalization of border controls (Zoppi and Puleri, 2021). Intragmentation thus sheds light on the processes through which the lines of political divisions eventually become integrated to different degrees within a broader political process (such as EU enlargement), serving various scopes, of which the case of migration above is one example. Clearly enough, open disputes remain unsettled and keep creating frictions among contending parties. Therefore, my answer to a rather obvious question – whether the EU integration of the Western Balkans can advance despite the evident disintegrating tendencies in both areas – is positive. Fragmentation does not necessarily exclude integration – although it may represent a considerable slow-down factor for achieving that goal, as I will further demonstrate in the thematic chapters. After all, the ideas of “multi-speed” and “two-speed” Europe is very popular in the EU itself, or again of “integration à la carte” to indicate that member states can implement EU integration initiatives at different levels and pace, due to the specificities of each country. What perhaps is peculiar about intragmentation in its Western Balkan declination is the prevalence of political motivations behind it, which undermine regional cooperation and distract policymaking from addressing crucial issues, especially depopulation and demo-territorial transformations. The roots of this political prevalence over other spheres are deep, and depend essentially on the fact that the Western Balkans, as Yugoslav successor states, is still engaged in processes of nation- and state-building, which have to deal simultaneously with the collapse of socialism and communism, transition to liberal democracy, state dissolution, and war legacy. While the process just described is so complex and

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articulated that it cannot be fully taken into account in this book, its implications for the overall fragility of the region will be taken on board for analysis.

Aims and Structure of the Book This book provides an assessment of the Western Balkans’ future prospects from three angles of analysis: Europeanization, market and trade dynamics, and socio-­ demographic developments. Each is explored through the dynamics of intragmentation that I have presented above. The goal is to offer the reader a versatile understanding of the region through thematic chapters that deal with these questions especially. In doing so, I have purposely chosen to focus mainly on the last decade, with only a few deviations into the early 2000s, in order to maintain a balanced analytical emphasis on contemporary dynamics. Hence, I do not investigate thoroughly the history of the region, the socialist (and Stalinist, in Albania) era, or the legacy of the war and the subsequent stabilization years; those interested in exploring such matters will find valuable literature elsewhere, partly referenced in this book. This decision is motivated by two intellectual necessities. First, the recent literature on the Western Balkans does not often combine political, economic, and social analyses regarding the region in a comprehensive manner: knowledge and expertise tend to be compartmentalized vertically according to specific topics (e.g., EU accession, authoritarianism, nationalism, political reforms), in which history is usually granted a considerable effect.7 There is meager availability of books attempting to link aspects that are afferent to distinct societal spheres in the same work. I have therefore decided to go against the grain, elaborating an horizontal, bird’s-eye-view yet concise study of selected current affairs in Western Balkan countries that I find particularly relevant. This necessarily comes with a number of limitations, of which I am ultimately aware: some of the issues tackled in my analysis are in fact not investigated deeply, and some others are barely mentioned. However, as tradeoff (if you will), I have strived to provide the reader with relevant references to satisfy their curiosity. In such a way, I could fulfill what I consider to be the second necessity behind this book: the idea to focus especially on the future of the region, making imaginations of the future its scope, to which the description of the present is of course instrumental. This is, not a denial of the multiple repercussions that today spring from the past wars. Rather, it is a choice driven by what I have experienced directly while working and teaching on topics pertaining to the Western Balkans: new generations of regional students wish to overcome the deadlock of history in this part of Europe, through cooperation, sharing, and, importantly, identification of the 7  A few examples of recent publications: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the Western Balkans (Bieber, 2019); Western Balkan Economies in Transition: Recent Economic and Social Developments (Osbild & Bartlett, 2019); The Presidentialisation of Political Parties in the Western Balkans (Passarelli, 2018).

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common challenges waiting ahead precluding mutual and shared wellbeing. I have outlined some of these challenges in the previous pages, and others will be presented later. In the view of those I have met and spoken to, uncertainty and threats come more and more from the future than the past. I wanted to replicate this changing mindset in my book. While the three-fold distinction made for political, social, and aspects is reflected in the structure of the book, it is argued and demonstrated throughout the text that conceiving these spheres as distinct and independent is reductive if not counter-­ productive for analysis. They are instead strictly connected to one another, and in many cases even present mutually reinforcing aspects. Therefore, the three categories are best understood as overlapping layers, one fitting perfectly over the other and contributing to the overall profiling of the issues at stake. From chapter to chapter, I take stock of what my analysis has brought to light, building on previous findings to further illuminate contemporary dynamics we may observe in the Western Balkans and to imagine future developments. The research design of this book is distinctly interdisciplinary. The dialogue between different disciplines is in fact considered particularly effective for assessing the role of fragmentation and integration tendencies in diversely rooted human processes. Starting from traditional political science questions (e.g., Europeanization, political fragmentation), the pursuit of answers guides the analysis across other disciplines, exploring notions pertaining to political economy, political demography, and migration studies. Similarly, I use several tools: analysis of literature, official documents, and speeches by political figures; elaboration of data collected from international organizations and from the national statistical offices of the concerned countries; and short interviews with key individuals. The method above and the general research approach in this book allows me to shift the narrative from that of a dividing past to that of a common future, and also to deal with the otherwise diverse institutional, economic, and cultural landscape of the region: while each of the WB countries is fraught with peculiar challenges, they are all involved in those processes that I have anticipated as privileged objects of my analysis. The book is thus organized into three core chapters. Chapter 1 is titled “Regional Geopolitics: EU Integration Perspectives, Nationalistic Revivals, and External Actors”. I will commence my analysis from Europeanization, a highly transformative process that will end with the integration of the region in the EU. However, in the shadow of democratic transformations and political reforms, there are growing risks of political elites entrenching themselves in local and national institutions, in what is known as the state capture process. It may be argued that the Europeanization architecture in a volatile context like that of the Western Balkans is eventually exploited by these elites, and therefore integration conveys in itself seeds of internal political fragmentation. The recent mass migration flows along the so-called Balkan Route is a case in point, as it revealed at the same time the need for a solid EU–WB6 partnership for security and migration management and the existing limits to achieve this. The Balkan Route has provided the region with a renewed geopolitical importance, which makes intragmentation a very valuable analysis approach. The understanding of Europeanization is not complete without also including its potential

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spoilers and competitors: I will look at the global actors involved in regional affairs, such as China, the US, Russia, Turkey, and the Arab Gulf countries, to provide an assessment of what they are trying to achieve in the Western Balkans, and the significance of their actions for the Europeanization process. Finally, from the global and the supranational I will narrow down my point of view to deal with the dense cloud of tensions and rivalries in the region. These are often derived from the lack of reconciliation as well as the incomplete democratization process in which all six countries find themselves. In particular, I will consider the role played by nationalism revivals, which just as all over Europe represent here a further threat to the goals of political cooperation and settlement of disputes between the regional countries. In this context, ethnicity also becomes a tool to intercept people’s dissatisfaction and to preserve the mechanisms of state capture on the part of political elites, in connection with the manipulation of narratives about past conflicts and victimization processes. The analysis of the motives behind political fragmentation in the region will contextually provide important insights to imagine a way ahead. In particular, the intensification of migration along the Balkan Route, Brexit, and the global pandemic have attached new geopolitical meaning to the region. This implies the need for new engagements, a kind of discourse that holds significance for the EU especially since it has potential security and normative repercussions. The reconstruction of the network of political cooperation and rivalries in the region helps in the analysis of the economic aspects, which will be substantiated in Chap. 2, titled “Embedding the Regional Market?” I argue in fact that there are three non-mutually excluding viable future paths for the region: full convergence with the EU; more regional economic cooperation; and enhanced influence of external, non­EU actors. In order to understand the possibility of each, I review several factors that can have a recognizable impact on future developments: macroeconomic performance, intra-regional trade, and competitiveness, for whose description I draw on the databases of the leading international financial organizations. In the second part of the chapter, I contend that a core-periphery system (i.e., fragmentation) typifies the relations between the EU and the Western Balkans. I also describe what has come to be known as the Open Balkan initiative. The latter reveals the significance of the multi-layered analysis proposed in this book: focusing only on political matters – i.e., on political narratives, speeches, and the lack of reconciliation – would lead to rather hopeless conclusions. Moving beyond this reveals instead that there is a huge, untapped economic potential in the Western Balkans which can also be instrumental for enhancing regional cooperation. Moreover, its proper activation would certainly contribute to improving the economic conditions and to mitigating social developments, some of which are analyzed in the last of the core chapters. Chapter 3 carries the title of “Socio-Demographic Challenges: Migration and Territorial Impacts”, and brings the analysis to a narrower level. I examine some key socio-demographic changes occurring in the Western Balkan societies, with the help of data extracted from the six national statistical offices. I will show that social challenges are also important in shaping the future of the regional countries. All of them are in fact undergoing processes of territorial transition, and depopulating in rural and peripheral areas, while increasingly enlarging capitals and major cities,

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where wealth also tends to accumulate. This transformation makes it necessary to undertake a general reflection on growing inequalities: rising unemployment, aging of population, and lack of services in rural areas. What sorts of challenges (also political) will these trends bring to the Western Balkans? Can a territorially fragmented country integrate successfully in the EU? The chapter will deal extensively with such questions. The other face of the same coin is emigration: the number of young individuals annually leaving WB6 indicates that the EU remains the preferred destination to find better opportunities. Should we nevertheless consider it an instance of integration, although taking place at the cost of internal socio-­ demographic laceration? And with what potential long-term political repercussions? This is perhaps where the book contributes most to ongoing debates, showing why it is worth anticipating this type of discourse  – and thus to elaborate solutions  – before reality manifests itself abruptly. In the Conclusions I will wrap up the evidence of my three-fold analysis into a comprehensive vision of the Western Balkans between fragmentation and integration pushes. The sum of the arguments presented in the book gives us, first of all, the possibility to reconsider the Western Balkans as a region per se, with the scope of gaining an internal perspective on its main political, economic, and social trajectories. Second, it will be possible to assess if such trajectories suggest convergence toward Europe or if they indicate that the region is instead shying away from it. In doing so, the book substantiates the regional future in terms of common dynamics, challenges, and opportunities, to stimulate new debates featuring the regional future at their center. In fact, narratives and imaginations can change not just with reference to the past, but also in connection to the future. This is crucial to note, because if human beings tend to assess a change in the present in comparison with the past, we should not forget that the notion of the past in the Western Balkans is particularly heterogeneous and contested.

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Ortakovski, V. (2013). “Balkan Wars and ‘Greater State’ Nationalisms in Balkan Politics.” TASAM. https://tasam.org/en/Icerik/24686/balkan_wars_and_greater_state_nationalisms_in_ balkan_politics Osbild, R., & Bartlett, W. (2019). The Western Balkans on the road to the EU: An introduction. In R. Osbild & W. Bartlett (Eds.), Western Balkan economies in transition (pp. 1–13). Springer. Privitera, F. (2018). Dalla disgregazione dell’URSS alla crisi ucraina: autodeterminazione e sovranità nello spazio post-sovietico. In S. Bianchini & A. Fiore (Eds.), Russia e Cina nel mondo globale (pp. 15–28). Carocci Editore. Samokhvalov, V. (2017). Russian-European relations in the Balkans and Black Sea region. Palgrave Macmillan. Simić, J. (2019). “Three countries agree mini Schengen in the Balkans,” Euractiv, October 11. https://www.euractiv.com/section/enlargement/news/three-­countries-­agree-­mini-­schengen-­in-­ the-­balkans/ (accessed 1 February 2020). Tcherneva, V. (2019). Europe’s new agenda in the Western Balkans. European Council on Foreign Relations. Todorova, M. (2009). Imagining the Balkans. Oxford University Press. UK Government. (2019). “UK and Commonwealth will champion free trade in face of growing global challenges,” Press Release, October 9. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ uk-­and-­commonwealth-­will-­champion-­free-­trade-­in-­face-­of-­growing-­global-­challenges Zoppi, M. (2020). How many Europes? Fragmentation in the European space since the great recession. The International Spectator, 55(3), 35–49. Zoppi, M., & Puleri, M. (2021). The Balkan route (and its afterlife): The new Normal in the European politics of migration. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies https://doi.org/ 10.1080/19448953.2021.2015658. Zsiros, S., & Somerville, H. (2021). “EU’s credibility ‘undermined’ if North Macedonia delayed from joining the bloc,” Euronews, May 7. https://www.euronews.com/2021/05/07/ albania-­could-­begin-­eu-­membership-­talks-­without-­north-­macedonia

Contents

1 Regional Geopolitics: EU Integration Perspectives, Nationalistic Revivals, and External Actors����������������������������������������������������������������    1 EU Enlargement and the Europeanization Process in the Western Balkans������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    2 The Geopolitical Awakening of the Western Balkans: The Balkan Route��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    5 Non-EU Actors in the Western Balkans: An Assessment��������������������������    9 Reconciliation and Ethno-Nationalism������������������������������������������������������   14 Conclusion ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   22 2 Embedding the Regional Market? ����������������������������������������������������������  23 Economies in Transition����������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 The Regional Economic Outlook��������������������������������������������������������������   25 International Competitiveness and Attractiveness ������������������������������������   29 Intra-regional Trade ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   35 The Open Balkan Proposal������������������������������������������������������������������������   38 Open Balkan: Initial Reactions Across the Region������������������������������������   41 The Significance of Open Balkan��������������������������������������������������������������   43 The Core-Periphery Model of Analysis: Still Valid for the Future?����������   45 Non-EU Actors and the Challenges to EU Convergence��������������������������   48 Conclusion ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   50 3 Socio-demographic Challenges: Migration and Territorial Impacts ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   53 When Data Are Political: Preliminary Considerations on the WB6’s Statistical “Black Hole” ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   53 Overview of Demographic Features����������������������������������������������������������   55 Territorial Perspectives������������������������������������������������������������������������������   57 Internal Migration��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   58 Regional and International Migration��������������������������������������������������������   61

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Contents

Irregular Migration and the Participation of WB6 Citizens in the Balkan Route������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 Inequality, Corruption, and Protest������������������������������������������������������������   65 Conclusion ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   67 Conclusions��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  69 References ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  73

Chapter 1

Regional Geopolitics: EU Integration Perspectives, Nationalistic Revivals, and External Actors

In 1989, there were only two states in the Balkans. The same territorial surface contains now eight states. If we were to look for a single fact that could convey the gist of the political transformations that occurred in the region since the collapse of Yugoslavia, this would probably be the best choice. Two among the successor states (Croatia and Slovenia) have joined the European Union, while the remaining five former republics of Yugoslavia, together with Albania, constitute the six Western Balkan countries. As underlined earlier, this neologism is thus both a geographic and a geopolitical expression that refers to the common aspiration of the six countries to join the EU or, alternatively, to the willingness of the Union to incorporate them (cf. Pula, 2014). Between that “zero hour”, year 1989, and present times stands a series of conflicts and crimes against the humanity that have caused the death of nearly 150,000 people as well as thousand internal displaced people and refugees. This span of time includes the outbreak of the conflict in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991, which would end with the Dayton Agreement in 1995, yet also the riots, then turned into war, in Kosovo between 1996 and 1999 as well as the 2000–2001 insurgency in then Macedonia. Most of these conflicts were preceded and followed by forced migrations and ethnic cleansing operations: for example, the Serbs residing in predominantly Muslim areas of Bosnia gradually moved to Serbia; Serbs from the predominantly Albanian areas of Kosovo also moved to Serbia; thousands of Croatians have fled the Serbian and Muslim areas of Bosnia for Croatia; Bosniaks were expelled from towns in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina; and so on. The twisting of tensions and conflict quickly transformed entire groups into minorities, thereby exposing them to intimidation, threats, and violence, while large forced emigration flows led to the formation of ethnically homogenous areas. Twenty years after that guns have been silenced, nothing reveals in clearer terms that the political fallout of the bloody wars has not ceased producing effects than Bosnia and Herzegovina’s division in two sub-national entities and one district; Kosovo’s disputed international recognition and, across the region, non-ratified borders; widespread political instability; and the numerous instances of contestation of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Zoppi, Futures of the Western Balkans, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89628-7_1

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the public memory of past events and historical personalities. At the same time, the comparative stability of the last two decades is not to be taken for granted and appears to be also the result of the direct diplomatic and political involvement of the EU in the region. The next section explains in more detail through which processes this was realized.

 U Enlargement and the Europeanization Process E in the Western Balkans The integration of the Western Balkans in the European Union has represented from its very start an instrument to defuse conflict threats within the continent. One can find the roots of it in July 1991, when at the onset of the war the President of the EU Council Jacques Poos claimed the beginning of the now famous “hour of Europe”, namely, the EU’s turn in solving the Yugoslav crisis. The EU’s strategic vision emerged more clearly in the 2003 Thessaloniki European Council, which affirmed that “the future of the region [the WB] as an integral part of the EU is in the Union’s very own political, security and economic interest”. The same position has been stated again in all the EU key documents and initiatives launched since. Even the mere prospective integration has functionally worked as conflict prevention strategy. Take, for example, the following excerpt from the 2006 Enlargement Strategy: Enlargement has been at the heart of the EU’s development over several decades. The very essence of European integration is to overcome the division of Europe and to contribute to the peaceful unification of the continent. Politically, EU enlargement has helped respond to major changes such as the fall of dictatorships and the collapse of communism. It has consolidated democracy, human rights and stability across the continent. Enlargement reflects the EU’s essence as a soft power, which has achieved more through its gravitational pull than it could have achieved by other means

The current EU approach for the WB is centered on what could be termed as “positive peace”, an agenda that contemplates, among other things, reconciliation efforts, respect for the rule of law, protection of minorities against discrimination, free press, and fight against corruption (see Ioannides, 2018). This positive peace approach – meaning peaceful inter-state relations on the basis of mutual efforts and consensus  – aims at providing the concerned actors with the instruments to deal with conflicts that are not yet solved (Kulkova, 2019). It represents an evolution of the previous phase of stabilization, which consisted of disarmament and securitization in the aftermath of the war. Over time, the EU has developed more and more integration instruments that specifically target the Western Balkans or that include the region into cooperation initiatives on a broader scale: the most relevant are funding mechanisms like the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA) that provides financial and technical help to enlargement countries. Regional cooperation initiatives include the Central European Initiative, the oldest cooperation forum established in 1989 and now headquartered in Trieste; the EU Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR) and for the Adriatic and Ionian Region (EUSAIR), two of

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the macro-regional strategies adopted by the European Commission in 2010 and 2014, respectively, with the aim of fostering cooperation between territories on a number of shared issues and development opportunities; and the Berlin Process, an intergovernmental cooperation initiative launched in 2014 to revitalize the ties between the region and the participating EU member states, in particular after that the then EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker cooled enlargement prospects as neo-President of the EU Commission. The long-term goal of the positive peace agenda is the incorporation of the area into the EU, as re-emphasized by the two strategic communications of the Union: A credible enlargement perspective for and enhanced EU engagement with the Western Balkans (February 2018) and the Enhancing the accession process  – A credible EU perspective for the Western Balkans (February 2020). In its communications, the EU asks the regional governments to take action in respect to ensure the rule of law, fundamental rights, and governance; in strengthening the economy; in applying EU rules and standards; and in achieving reconciliation, good neighborly relations, and regional cooperation. The “unequivocal support for the European perspective of the Western Balkans” was reaffirmed also at the EU-Western Balkans summit held in Zagreb on 6 May 2020. The EU resorts to a regime of “conditionality” and to both country-to-country and regional approaches to influence the process of institutional and political change and to make sure that democratization is advancing. The principle of conditionality stems from the 1993 Copenhagen criteria, which regulate a country’s eligibility to join the European Union. Such criteria, made increasingly stringent by the EU, work as guiding lights indicating the way for aspiring EU countries. In this framework, we understand conditionality as a tool for the EU to project externally its intentions, its spirit, and ultimately its acquis on (potential) candidates, remotely guiding their internal reform processes. Conditionality works as “reinforcement by reward” and as “external incentives for a target government to comply with its conditions” (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, 2014, 670). The process through which non-EU countries absorb EU rules is widely known as “Europeanization” and was tested already in the previous enlargement rounds. Importantly, it has been noted recently that compliance with EU conditionality by national governments is more effective when associated with accession negotiations and a credible accession prospect (Damjanovski & Markovikj, 2020, 76). Since the early 2000s, the academia has animated an interesting debate on the elements constituting the Europeanization process, analyzing various sectors where they become manifest, ranging from domestic policy to foreign and international development policy, to LGBT activism, to vocational training, and to memory politics (Vink & Graziano, 2007; Olsen, 2013; Ante, 2016; Bilić, 2016; Milošević & Trošt, 2021). Research in this area has developed as a direct consequence of the EU’s eastern enlargement process taking place in the same period and has since increasingly incorporated new issue areas. The basic understanding of Europeanization consists in seeing it as a process through which the EU affects the domestic spheres of EU and non-EU members (e.g., reforms and legislation), in relation to what to discuss, adopt, and apply internally (cf. Orbie & Carbone, 2016, 2).

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In the informed literature on the topic, the term Europeanization has eventually become mainly synonymous with two, often simultaneous, processes. On the one hand, it refers to the adaption to EU norms in a given country, whether that is a member state already or a candidate country (McCall & Wilson, 2010). On the other hand, the term indicates a rather reverse dynamic, namely, the changes realizing in the Europeanization process as a result of occurred domestic transformations in target countries (cf. Džankić et al., 2019). Europeanization is therefore both a top-­ down and a bottom-up process and requires an approach that is aware of its dynamic nature composed of interactions and reciprocal influence (Ante, 2016, 21). One can retrieve such duality also in the two theoretical paradigms that have become dominant to explain the transformative power of Europe. These are known as “rationalist institutionalism” and “constructivist institutionalism”. The former approach is built on the idea that states act as rational actors that implement EU norms on the primary basis of cost-benefit calculations (Fagan & Sircar, 2015). The other paradigm emphasizes the sociological aspects in the process, underlining that institutional change occurs via diffusion and transfer of ideas, principles, and eventually behaviors. While exploring these paradigms in more detail would perhaps fall beyond the scope of this book, it is important to extract their core assumption, namely, that a range of factors help in explaining why third countries decide to comply with EU norms, harmonize to the acquis, and implement European standards (Sissenich, 2007; Gordy & Efendic, 2019). More specifically, rationalist institutionalists apply a “logic of consequentiality” to both EU and EU candidate institutions, according to which actors (e.g., candidate countries) adjust their behaviors to maximize utility. By the same token, the EU can influence such calculations via incentives, among which are conditionality. Constructivist institutionalism explains adjustment to EU norms in terms of a “logic of appropriateness”, where the political elites and the societies of candidate countries adopt EU norms and requisites only when they see the latter as legitimate. Social learning, persuasion, and behavioral change are in this case considered more effective than calculations for producing change (Checkel, 2005; Gordy & Efendic, 2019). As many theorists contend – and as I will argue as well – both perspectives are critical to understand the process of EU convergence. In particular, the interplay between the two logics of Europeanization sheds light on what has been termed “stabilitocracy”, the recent tendency emerging in EU-WB relations to favor a modicum of stability and security over far-reaching, demanding results (which I categorize as example of intragmentation). Theoretical reflections concern also the study of the impact of Europeanization. More specifically, it has been suggested that Europeanization can be dissected on the basis of the effects it produces in three distinct spheres: policy, polity, and politics (cf. Orbie & Carbone, 2016). In the domain of policies, the impact of the EU is detectable in tools and discourses that go together with policy decisions. These are not aspects of minor importance, since European integration includes among other things adherence to liberalization policies, which brings to more dependence on global markets and affects crucially the way in which national production and distribution are organized (Bjelić et al., 2013). The sphere of polity is useful to take into consideration change in domestic institutions or in state-society relations as a result of alignment

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with the EU. This indication is quite important as well, in a context where ethnic divisions are part and parcel of everyday consensus-making and may thus hamper the political will to reform (cf. Čeperković & Gaub, 2018). In fact, democratization sustained by conditionality has at times also failed to deliver positive results, mostly because newborn or reformed democratic institutions remain highly vulnerable to infiltration and state capture dynamics (Kmezić, 2019). Finally, the sphere of politics involves “processes of interest formation, representation and public discourses” (Orbie & Carbone, 2016): this is another essential dimension of analysis, since very often political narratives are more influential and determinant than the object they refer to. Even more so, since the Western Balkans provides a context of analysis characterized by modest inter- and intra-state political reconciliation as well as weak democratization (Džihić & Draško, 2018). Hence, applying this notion means exploring how the EU appears in the background of national debates (political parties, civil society), especially in view of prospective accession to the Union and of what membership is supposed to bring. Comparing Europeanization processes over place and time, Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2019, 21) argue that: In the CEE and SEE pre-accession contexts, the EU offers the same (high) rewards, but their credibility has diminished significantly (…) compliance has suffered overall. Moreover, it has varied across time and countries in line with variation in the credibility of EU rewards

However, in almost 20 years of significant efforts, the tangible results in terms of realization of integration have been somewhat asymmetric, and the Western Balkan countries represent today a patchwork of diverse accession status: four countries are officially recognized as EU candidate countries (Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia), and the other two, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, hold the status of potential EU candidate countries. The latter category is defined as “countries/entities which have a clear prospect of joining the EU in the future but have not yet been granted candidate country status”.1 Montenegro and Serbia are the only two regional countries that currently enjoy an ongoing negotiating status with the EU, while I have recounted already the initial veto imposed on the opening for Albanian and Montenegro by France, Denmark, and the Netherlands in late 2019 and then reiterated for North Macedonia only by Bulgaria.

 he Geopolitical Awakening of the Western Balkans: T The Balkan Route The so-called Balkan Route of migration has recently come to overturn the perceived geopolitical role of the Western Balkans in both internal and international politics. In fact, it has exposed dramatically the Western Balkans as a transit path 1  Official definition of the European Union. Cf.: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/enlarg/candidates.htm

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towards the EU for asylum seekers and economic migrants, turning their governments from night to day into fundamental allies for containing, pushing back, and managing the migration flows peaking in 2015. The “Balkan Route” is the expression through which the pathway from Greek islands and inland to Central and Northern European countries became known in international media and debates since late 2014. In fact, in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war, more and more asylum seekers started to embark on a journey to Europe via this route, often resorting to smugglers, in search for peace and better life opportunities. While the Syrians escaping the civil war at home would compose the major share of those marching towards EU countries, many were reported also escaping Iraq and Afghanistan (two countries that had been already in turmoil) and – at a later point – from Western Balkan countries themselves. At the time when the phenomenon became relevant in terms of numbers, with “long marches” of people being aired on national and international broadcasters, the Balkan Route involved Bulgaria and Greece as entry points; North Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Hungary as transit countries; and then Austria, Germany, France, and the Netherlands as some of the top destination countries. Between 2014 and 2015, Frontex detected more than 950,000 attempts at crossing borders irregularly along the Balkan Route. In these 2  years alone, 1,950,000 asylum applications were lodged in EU countries, with Germany receiving roughly one-third of the total (680,000). The context along the Balkan Route evolved fluidly, characterized by a “securitization” shift in both narratives and practices: in 2014, Bulgaria fenced parts of its borders with Turkey; in September 2015, Hungary commenced sealing its borders with barbed-wire barriers, causing migrants to divert in Croatia and Slovenia instead – a longer journey to the same destination countries. While the EU solidarity begun to crumble, all concerned countries adopted a mix of measures (notably walls, physical pushbacks, tightening of asylum legislation) to discourage migrants from crossing. Eventually, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro became part of the Balkan Route as well, since “sideways” became necessary to avoid the most patrolled borders or crossings. As during 2016 most EU countries had sealed off their borders, several thousand migrants became stranded in Western Balkan countries with few chances to proceed further and met with very few integration policies in those countries they barely know of before entering. Camps near the cities of Horgoš, Bihać, and Velika Kladuša became the regional counterparts of the temporary encampments erected in Calais, Idomeni, and Ventimiglia. Migrants were reported drowning in the Aegean Sea and in the Korana and Sana rivers, or freezing to death at the borders of Bulgaria and Serbia, or again dying out of health issues in camps. In December 2020, a fire has burned down the Lipa Camp, near Bihać, leaving hundreds of migrants without shelter in harsh winter conditions. Brussels became increasingly concerned that Western Balkans “countries were simply passing on the people to neighbours further along the route” (EC, 2015a). Therefore, in order to limit migration flows at the very entry of the route, the EU reached a controversial agreement with Turkey on 18 March 2016 aimed at preventing new crossing across the Aegean through a resettlement scheme and an additional financial aid of €3bn for Turkey. The shaky moral (and legal) grounds of the

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“Turkey Deal” were underlined from the onset by NGOs and international associations, and in the space of few years, two additional issues became evident: on the one hand, the EU had committed too much with Turkey and could not follow on its promises. On the other hand, Turkey used migrants as bargaining chips, to put pressure on the EU on certain matters, ranging from guarantees on more funds to the support of Ankara’s military operations in Syria, specifically in Idlib. At the beginning of March 2021, as the Deal expired, Turkey let refugees marching towards Europe, triggering the firm reaction of Greek police. While the EU-Turkey Deal is temporarily suspended and may be renewed by the involved parties, the Western Balkans is once more vital for helping the EU in managing the flows. As anticipated, many WB citizens joined the marches and ended up submitting an asylum application in one of the EU countries. Between 2014 and 2020, there were more than 515,000 applications from WB citizens being lodged to EU countries, prevalently Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, according to Eurostat data. In 2014, they amounted to almost 18% of the total applications recorded in all EU27 countries. However, more than 93% of the asylum applications by WB citizens were eventually rejected, since the EU included all the WB countries in the list of safe countries of origin. Furthermore, the analysis of the WB citizens’ reasons for applying for asylum highlights that this mobility flow was scarcely connected to humanitarian motives (Easo, 2015). The precarious economic conditions lived by many in the Western Balkans as well as the attractiveness of the EU are for the most part the responsible factors. Chapters 2 and 3 will provide a useful background to understand more of these emigration flows. At the government level, the management of migration quickly took a securitization shift in the entire region. In the early phase at least, “the governments expressed a deep conviction that their contributions in solving the refugee crisis could only be temporal and limited due to the fact that they had no responsibility for the crisis nor economic means to tackle it” (Šelo Šabić, 2017, 68). This approach was directly based on the widespread idea that the Western Balkans was only a transit region on the path to Central and Northern Europe. The development of the events and the initiatives of the EU have though brought relevant changes to their status as transiting countries. In fact, the mass migration flows had the effect of revealing the Western Balkans for their strategic role as partner for security, which the EU needs in order to control and manage irregular flows. In turn, this has given the region an opportunity to demonstrate its ability to cooperate with EU member states. The reciprocal commitment between the EU and the Western Balkans was confirmed in the 2018 Sofia Summit, whose final declarations report on the one hand recalls the need to improve the record of reconciliation, good neighborly relations, regional stability, and mutual cooperation, while on the other hand it states: The EU and the Western Balkans partners share many security challenges that demand coordinated individual and collective action. When we work together, we are able to address these challenges effectively. Our cooperation in stemming illegal migration flows has demonstrated its value and will be developed further

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By involving the Western Balkans into security strategies, the EU has sought to strengthen their capacity to deal with migration challenges. In fact, during the mass migration flows, WB countries collected rather low numbers of asylum applicants: according to UNHCR data, in the period 2014–2020, there have been nearly 50,000 new applications, mostly in Serbia and Kosovo (46.5%), followed by Montenegro (21.3%) and Albania (15.8%). A small number when compared to the same statistics in the EU countries and even in respect to the population size of WB countries. Even smaller than the number of asylum applications to EU countries from WB citizens and, for that matter, smaller than the internal migrants recorded in the same period in the Western Balkans, as we shall see in Chap. 3. Besides an overall question of attractiveness of this region, the data above suggest to take into account the efficiency of asylum procedures and integration policies in Western Balkan countries. I shall recall here that detention and placement in closes facilities for asylum seekers are measures that were implemented in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, following the example of what was done also by some EU countries (see Kilibarda, 2018; Zoppi & Puleri, 2021). In these regards, the EU has implemented a dual strategy, supporting securitizing and humanitarian interventions at the same time. On 26 October 2015, several countries along the Balkan Route  – and destination countries such as Austria and Germany – elaborated the 17-point agreement, where it was stated that “The past weeks have shown that the challenges currently faced along the Western Balkans migration route will not be solved through national actions. Only a collective, cross-­ border approach based on cooperation can succeed”. In the agreement, the need to ensure the protection of human rights of migrants was coupled with measures to strengthen the exchange of information, the management of migration, and border controls and to limit secondary movements (EC, 2015b). Moreover, the EU has created synergies with humanitarian actors: Since 2018, the Commission has been working with humanitarian partners and the authorities to cover the basic needs of refugees and migrants and to help the country strengthen its migration management capacity, allocating €34 million in additional EU funding. This is supporting temporary reception centres, and access to food, basic services and protection for the most vulnerable, with over 3,500 people benefitting

At the end of 2020, the EU committed to grant an additional €25 million assistance package to support Bosnia and Herzegovina in managing migration, and 3.5 were announced in January 2021, bringing the total EU support provided to Bosnia and Herzegovina for migration management since 2018 to €85.5 million, including €10.3 million of humanitarian assistance.2 In sum, the events of the Balkan Route have led to an accelerated cooperation between the EU and the WB countries, representing a stepping stone in the joint work on security and migration management that can provide a blueprint for future initiatives. Cooperation on security has offered to the WB countries a field to demonstrate the progress achieved with Europeanization process – and perhaps it even  Reported here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_21_2

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came to represent its best expression so far (Zoppi and Puleri, 2021). At the same time, the “legacy” of the Balkan Route, if you will, is that the Western Balkans has still limited capability to absorbing the shocks that affect the EU, just as the case of migration flows has showed. For as much as Europeanization represents an important tool, an issue of attractiveness of the WB countries, even for their citizens, remains to be addressed.

Non-EU Actors in the Western Balkans: An Assessment Several global actors have demonstrated interest for the Western Balkans since the end of the 2000s, in correspondence with the relative stabilization of the political landscape. This is reflected also in specific patterns of investment and financial dynamics that I will describe in Chap. 2. In this section, I will summarize the main patterns of external, non-EU involvement we may observe in the region, in which again the political and economic dimensions overlap without a neat distinction. The penetration of new players has been at times described as against the EU’s efforts in the region; nevertheless, I will argue that it is not necessarily so. The best example to illustrate this point is the increasing presence of Chinese investments in the six WB countries, the first case I take into account. The pace of Chinese investments in the Western Balkans has undergone a remarkable acceleration: if in the first decade of the new millennium the Chinese actors in the area were few state-owned enterprises bidding in the transport and energy sectors, in the second half of the 2010s, more and more Chinese companies are reported operating in the region via loans issued by Chinese banks (cf. Bastian, 2017). The blueprint for the activities of Chinese companies in the Western Balkans is provided by President Xi Jinping’s 2013 One Belt, One Road or Belt and Road initiative, namely, the Chinese strategic plan aimed at improving global infrastructure connections as well as maritime routes for commerce, stretching from Beijing to Venice, from Jakarta to Rotterdam. China has identified in the Balkans a piece of its Belt and Road Initiative puzzle and for this scope is ensuring trade deals, financial investments, and energy cooperation. China’s emphasis on trade, as noted by Hackaj (2019, 71), demonstrates that “Chinese businesses have chosen to focus on mercantile and business areas, leaving aside investment in institution building or the rule of law”. In order to pave the way for its grand investment plan, China has launched the “16 + 1” summits and the “Twelve Measures for Promoting Friendly Cooperation with Central and Eastern European Countries” in 2012.3 Warsaw hosted the first 3  “16 + 1” refers to China and 16 Central, Eastern, and Western Balkan countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Kosovo is not included, as China does not recognize its independence. In early 2021, the Lithuanian government has announced its withdrawal from the group, as explained in the main text.

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16  +  1 summit, followed by Bucharest (2013), Belgrade (2014), Suzhou (2015), Riga (2016), Budapest (2017), Sofia (2018), and Dubrovnik (2019). These initiatives have been essential to set forth the aims and to reinvigorate the cooperation for boosting trade and develop economic and technological zones in the area. The summits are part of the Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries organization, under the aegis of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and thus enjoy full institutional recognition. For a short time, the cooperation platform turned even into “17 + 1”, when Greece joined it in 2019: but in March 2021 Lithuania announced that it would leave the group, calling it “divisive”. The entry of Greece did not come by surprise, in the light of COSCO’s (a Chinese state-owned company) acquisition of the 51% stake Piraeus port and launch of an ambitious upgrade plan worth €600 million to turn Athens’ port in the biggest commercial harbor in Europe. Greek interests and Chinese investments are increasingly matching. If the Piraeus will be a fundamental entry point for Chinese goods in the near future, the same goods need reliable infrastructures to continue their commercial journey northwards. For this reason, Beijing has already contributed to the opening of sections of the international E-763 highway, connecting Serbia and Montenegro. Chinese building companies and banks are also highly involved in the upgrade of the existing Budapest-Belgrade railway cutting through Bács-Kiskun and Vojvodina. The Chinese state loan is set to cover the 85% of total costs, which will be necessary to provide 444 Km of overhead electrical lines, 374 km of track to make all the line double-track, plus bridges, level crossings, and wires – a project that will cut down the journey time between the two capitals by almost two-thirds (cf. Rogers, 2019, 3).4 China’s operations in the Western Balkans move beyond crucial transports lines and logistics. An example is the Pupin Bridge in Belgrade, the second city’s bridge on the Danube, which benefits mostly the inhabitants of the Serb capital. Built in 2014, it is considered the first major Chinese-built infrastructure project in Europe and has earned for itself the colloquial nickname the Chinese bridge (Nikolic, 2014). Another case concerns the expansion of the Serbian Kostolac thermal power plant, out of Chinese loans covering the 85% of total costs. A similar deal was signed for the thermal power plant in Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina). The involvement of China in the infrastructural upgrade continues also outside the Western Balkans. It is worth mentioning here the construction of the Pelješac Bridge in Croatia, which once completed will connect the southern exclave of Dubrovnik-Neretva County to mainland Croatia, avoiding crossing Bosnia and Herzegovina and reducing the travel time between Dubrovnik and Split. While the EU finances through Cohesion Policy funds the 85% of the total project costs (€357 millions), China Road and Bridge Corporation won the tender to realize the bridge.

4  There has been some criticism around the project: the two key points of the argumentation, I believe, are the fact that the upgrade line will not serve many large towns, thus attracting fewer customers, and the estimated long time for repaying the loans to Chinese banks (cf. Pepermans, 2018, 11; Rogers, 2019, 10–11).

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The EU has been increasingly worried by China’s involvement in the region: the concerns and critics of its member states have taken different forms, although the political aspects are often predominant. On the one hand, it is true that Beijing found space for involvement in the Balkans in reason of the lack of adequate investments from the EU. As argued by Conley, Hillman, and Melino (2019), “there was a strong infrastructure demand signal emanating from the region, which grew frustrated when its needs for new roads, modern ports, and high-speed rail went unmet by Western investment” – and China has proposed to support in its own terms the infrastructural upgrade needed in the region. On the other hand, this is not necessary in conflict with the goals that the EU is seeking to pursue in the region. The measure of both challenges and opportunities is well captured in the EU policy document of March 2019 titled “EU-China – A strategic outlook” (EC, 2019, 1, my emphasis): China is, simultaneously, in different policy areas, a cooperation partner with whom the EU has closely aligned objectives, a negotiating partner with whom the EU needs to find a balance of interests, an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance. This requires a flexible and pragmatic whole-of-EU approach enabling a principled defence of interests and values

Moreover, if we borrow Rogers’ reading of China’s involvement in Hungary, “it is unlikely that China will attempt to ‘compete’ with any Western MNCs [multinational corporations] (…), as their strategy is designed more to develop projects that remain unrealized by the EU or Western entities” (Rogers, 2019, 19). Therefore, the Chinese initiatives provide indirectly the Western Balkans with the means to realize EU convergence: in particular, it offers the advantages of fostering economic growth and improving the connectivity of the region, also in terms of bridge between Asia and Europe (Hackaj, 2019). However, the political implications are not as innocent: the Montenegrin government’s total external debt is growing as a relevant part of the national GDP and for one-third is owed to China which is building the first highway in the country (Vukićević, 2021). In case Montenegro will not be able to repay the loan to the Chinese bank Exim Bank, China may possibly exert the right to seek reimbursement by taking control of the infrastructure revenues. This would change the level of Beijing’s involvement in the region. However, in July 2021, Podgorica has announced to have repaid the first installment of the loan. Let us now consider Russia: Moscow has been long engaged with the Western Balkans, not least via continuation of supply contracts of the Soviet era, even if it has not managed to become a crucial trade partner since the breakup of Yugoslavia. In particular, Moscow entertains good relations with Serbia, with which shares cultural and religious ties (both are Easter Orthodox countries). Energy, heavy industry, and mining occupy a special place in current Russian economic activities in the Western Balkans (cf. Bechev & Radeljić, 2018). Like China, the main actors of Russia’s economic expansion are state-controlled companies or private companies whose majority shares are held by the state: Zarubezhneft, Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, and Lukoil are among the largest firms that one finds operating in the energy and oil sector across the region, at times under conditions of monopoly. In Serbia, Gazprom Neft is the majority shareholder of Naftna Industrija Srbije, the only

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national company dealing with exploration and production of crude oil and gas and with the production of geothermal energy. In Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, Gazprom handles the total provision of natural gas. In addition, Zarubezhneft owns Brod oil refinery in Banja Luka and a network of petrol stations in North Macedonia via PAO Lukoil (Vlček & Jirušek, 2019, 146). Both Serbia and North Macedonia are directly interested by the Tesla pipeline project proposal, which would extend towards Central Europe the TurkStream pipeline currently streaming natural gas from Russia to Turkey, crossing the Black Sea. The Russian economic presence, so focused and specialized on the energy sector, does not seem to interfere directly with the activities of China and the EU (and, for that matter, of the other actors that will be described below). After all, EU members themselves rely abundantly on the import of natural gas from Gazprom and therefore are not in the position to meet the energy demands in the Western Balkans in the place of state-controlled Russian companies. The presence and enlargement of Russian investments in this sector and in the connected sectors of oil production and processing constitute a feature that we are likely to retrieve for the coming years in the Western Balkans. According to some analysts, Russian market penetration would be finalized at achieving also political goals, in order to “creating dependencies” from Moscow: but then again, the same could be argued for any other actors economically engaged in the region (Secrieru, 2020, 3). Still, Moscow’s political involvement in the region is tangible, although it appears to be often driven by the principle of undermining NATO and EU efforts, rather than aimed at building its own strategy of influence in the region. In fact, the Russian pattern of action in the WB has been described as “a myriad of destabilising actions” (Secrieru, 2020, 2) by state and non-state actors aimed at influencing electoral processes and supporting individuals, leaders, political parties, and extremist groups that threaten cohesion in the region, which in turn affect the accession process to the EU (cf. Lika, 2019, 11; Panagiotou, 2021). Therefore, the effectiveness of Russian operations in the region is strictly connected to the credibility of the EU’s initiatives for political stability. A recent example showing Russia’s strategy for the WB has been the case of the name dispute between Greece and what is now North Macedonia. In 2018, the governments of these two countries agreed on the name change – satisfying Greece’s long-term request in exchange for the removal of Greece’s veto on North Macedonia’s accession to NATO and the EU. The expansion of the latter – after the accession of Montenegro in 2017 – would bring the Western Balkans farther away from Russia’s possibility to exert political influence. Therefore, in that occasion, the Kremlin attempted to portray in the media the name change as an imposition of the West, claiming that such discussion should take place in the UN, a forum where it holds veto power to stop the process. An anti-agreement campaign appeared also on social networks, although Russia denied any involvement (Tisdall, 2018). At the same time, the reception of the agreement in the civil society in North Macedonia was not particularly enthusiastic: the referendum held in North Macedonia on 30 September 2018 to validate the Prespa Agreement failed to reach the threshold of 50% participation required (94.1% of those voting were

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nevertheless in favor of the name change). The low turnout provided the ground for internal tensions, with the opposition claiming that the referendum was invalid and “humiliating” and the proponents arguing that the quorum was not binding since the referendum had to be ratified by two-thirds of the Assembly of the Republic (BBC, 2018).5 In fact, the implications of the name change for Macedonian nationalists were not at all irrelevant. To make things possibly worse, even the then pro-EU Prime Minister Zaev was quite explicit in declaring to the BBC that “we don’t change our name because we want to do it. We do it because of our future in the EU and NATO. Everyone is aware why we do it”. The Russian Foreign Ministry commented that the 36.8% referendum turnout meant that “Macedonian voters chose to boycott the solutions imposed on Skopje and Athens externally”, concluding that “the results of the vote were instantly hailed by the EU and NATO leaders, and in Washington as well. The desire to ensure and speed up Skopje’s accession to NATO despite the will of the people of Macedonia is evident” (MID, 2018). Was the case above a success story for Russian diplomacy or not? As a matter of fact, the name change has been officially implemented, but the impression is that the gains in terms of political stability have been very little – not least because Skopje would be ironically denied temporarily EU accession talks in late 2019, leading among other things to the resigning of the Prime Minister Zaev. I believe that this is an interesting example to see how Russia’s low-profile, “foggy” (because it resorts also to non-state actors) plays out in the region, at the expenses of both security and reconciliation in the region. At the same time, the vision of future membership in the EU, enshrined in the referendum, failed to attract the absolute majority of North Macedonians. The USA has invested intense diplomatic efforts (and military together with the other NATO participants) in the region especially to end the bloodshed in the 1990s and ensure post-conflict stability. Moreover, Washington has fully supported Kosovo’s independence in 2008 and today backs up its aspirations for Euro-Atlantic integration as well as the normalization of the relations with Serbia. Since 2008, the USA has progressively disengaged from the region, maintaining though a common vision for the region with the European Union, particularly on accession, on issues of stability and security, and on curbing Russia’s influence in the region. During the Trump administration (2017–2021), the meeting between Vučić and Thaçi briefly created the impression of a new season for US’s involvement in WB6 affairs, but the meeting has yielded little results (see also Chap. 2). Finally, I will consider the engagement in the region of Turkey and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. There is a record of consolidated investments in the Western Balkans coming from the mentioned countries that traces back to the late 1990s (see Estrin & Uvalic, 2016; Bartlett et al., 2017; Bieber & Tzifakis, 2019). The flow of capital targeted a variety of sectors: infrastructures, agriculture, security, and aviation emerge as the strategic assets favored by investors. The United Arab Emirates, for example, has purchased Air Serbia via their national company

 80 of the total 120 MPs voted in favor.

5

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Etihad and has funded the transformation of the airport in Kukës, Albania, now re-­ named Kukës International Airport Zayed, into an international flight destination international airport that was opened in July 2021. Turkey is another global actor including the Western Balkans in its range of external actions: the country has in fact deep historical and cultural ties with the Western Balkans as legacy of the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, Turkey was also involved in the efforts put in place by the international community to restore peace in the Balkans during the 1990s and participated to the most important initiatives (cf. Dursun-Ozkanca, 2016). Among these, it is worth mentioning Turkey’s participation in the NATO-led missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, namely, UNPROFOR, IFOR, SFOR, and KFOR (cf. Haldun et al., 2018). Present Turkey’s relations with the Western Balkans are preserved via free bilateral trade agreements with all regional countries (Hake & Radzyner, 2019) and also via cultural and religious links, especially with the Muslim populations. In this last respect, the Turkish Development Agency (Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, TIKA) has contributed financially to the restoration of mosques as well as Ottoman-period historical monuments (cf. Mastilovic and Zoppi, 2021).

Reconciliation and Ethno-Nationalism The lack of political reconciliation, namely, that intricate cloud of unsettled issues between and within countries, remains at present the first and foremost threat to the stability of the Western Balkans: a mortgage on the chances of future generations of WB6 to entertain peaceful relations with their regional neighbors and achieve better life conditions through trade and multi-level exchanges. This is why we need to keep in mind that the past, and most importantly the re-composition of the past, is still much relevant to explain the limits in imagining a different future in the focus region of this book. Or, as put by Bianchini (2017, 65): the still unresolved legacy of the profound national divisions accumulated over the course of the 20th century represent the most important aspect, in that it keeps the diffidence in the relationships between the various countries alive and prevents the empathetic entrenchment of a shared future, according to forms and methods rather more incisive than what was perceived and forecast by the European chancelleries or reported in the international press

What do we mean with the term reconciliation exactly? The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has though delineated the concept in a quite effective manner that is worth reproducing here (OSCE, 2012, 1): a process that aims to overcome conflicts by breaking the vicious cycle of mutual misperceptions and divisive memories, often resulting in violence, through the transformation of political and societal relationships. These should be based on notions of trust, equality, acceptance of differences, positive perceptions of each other, partnership, active friendship and mutual or joint interests.

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As with many concepts, the academic community has not agreed on a univocal definition of the term or of the process leading to it. However, an important element can be underlined out of the fertile debate in political science and other disciplines (Schaap, 2008; Lai, 2020): reconciliation efforts do not postulate the return to an alleged community arrangement that was (more) peaceful. Reconciliation should refer “to an imagined, counterfactual community” that responds to present aspirations and needs (Lai, 2020, 173). It is not the resurrection of a mythical past – for as much that time may be the object of nostalgia by some – but a strive for realizing a new understanding of community on new conditions. Through this process, “adversarial groups overcome their disputes and reconcile their differences by establishing friendly relations with one another” (Meka & Bianchini, 2020, 20). Reconciliation then inherently requires forward-looking thinking and commitment to realize a more just society. Few obstacles stand on the way to make the above possible. The unresolved and incomplete reconciliation process in the Western Balkans stems first of all from the thorny processes of accountability for the atrocities committed during the wars, the delays in the prosecution of war crimes, and the fate of missing people. To this, we need to add the question of internal displaced people (IDPs) generated by ethnic cleansing and armed conflicts in the 1990s: they are numbered in more than 300,000 today and still face significant challenges in terms of housing and labor access and ultimately in their return home. These people and their personal stories represent in fact a tangible example of the persisting legacy of the regional past. The lack of reconciliation is also visible in the border and statehood issues that continue plaguing the region. Segments of the border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are still disputed; the Inter-Entity Boundary Line in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose establishment was decided in the Dayton Agreement but never demarcated officially, actually cuts through 48 municipalities so that citizens of the same town find themselves divided in the Republika Srpska, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the Brčko District. Serbia and Montenegro quarrel over Montenegro’s border with Kosovo, since Serbia considers it a Serbian border since Belgrade does not recognize independent Kosovo. The international community, which took action to put an end to the war, engaged also in significant post-war reconciliation efforts through the mechanisms of transitional justice, namely, the identification of responsibilities and redress for victims. The most ambitious initiative has been the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that, at the closing of its activities at the end of 2017, had indicted 161 individuals and sentenced 90 for serious violations of humanitarian law marking an important chapter for the entire region.6 However, far from all justice demands arisen in the region could be met by the ICTY and other international bodies. Moreover, the ashes of war still smoking have 6  The UN’s Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) will deal with the remaining appeals, retrials, and contempt-of-court cases, assisting also the local war crimes prosecution offices in the Western Balkans. The 2017-established Kosovo Specialist Chambers, located in The Hague, will prosecute former Kosovo Liberation Army members for alleged crimes committed during and after the 1999 war.

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not prevented narratives on the alleged politicization of the ICTY activities, among which its perception as an instrument of Euro-Atlantic integration and thus ill-­ disposed towards Serbia since this country has historically links with Russia (Mastrorocco, 2020, 86). The politicization and more specifically the ethnicization of certain aspects can be identified as another factor behind the lack of reconciliation, which we can also explain through the concept of intragmentation. Neither can narratives that refuse to engage with the issue of responsibility expected to be overcome with prosecutions alone, as individuals compromised with the past have found their way into current political systems, which contribute to uphold impunity for these individuals and the crimes they have committed (Unger, 2018). The loss of legitimacy of involved actors is thus another facet of persisting lack of reconciliation. Yet, the absence of reconciliation goes considerably and importantly deeper, reaching into most aspects of everyday life, replicating itself in diverging narratives, in public statements, in stereotypes, in the divided school systems, and in the generally complicated educational context (cf. Lovec & Fennko, 2016; Jovanovic & Maric, 2018). The hotly debated law on religion approved at the end of 2019  in Montenegro proves the point. The “Freedom of Religion Law” required all religious communities to provide clear evidence of their ownership in the country, in order to retain such properties.7 According to the pro-Serb Democratic Front (DF), who opposed the government at the time, it was an attempt to attack the Serbian Orthodox Church and potentially confiscate its properties. The head of the DF party, Andrija Mandić, so spoke in the parliamentary discussion: “I invite all my war friends from 1991 and 1999 to be ready. You can count on the worst” (Kajosevic, 2019). A clear reference to the wars in Yugoslavia and a call for divisions along traditional ethnic lines. Another element preventing parties from reconciling over the past is the question of assumption of responsibility that goes together with victimization. In fact, taking responsibility for war crimes and violent acts  – and apologizing for them  – is a costly operation from a political point of view. Recognition of the harm done might not be well received by the domestic public opinion and can undermine popularity, also for the effects of intransigent oppositions that could take advantage of the situation and call for treason (Petričušić & Blondel, 2012). Due to reasons of political convenience, the ensuing apologies are often vague, or blame the interfering action of third parties, in such a way that the offending party appears manipulated and thus a victim itself. In other cases, official apologies may include reference to equal crimes suffered by the apologizing side, namely, with a “tendency to universalise the collective responsibility for the state crimes” that eventually diminishes its moral value (Horelt, 2015, 187). The penetration of the uncooperative spirit and of divisive discourses require continued efforts to prevent them to be passed down from one generation to the other, again and again. Those who believed that the 7  Due to the tensions and the protests, the law was amended in 2020 by the newly elected Montenegrin government, in such a way that the option to impound church properties is clearly removed.

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recovery of regional economic exchanges could assure on its own to achieve steps towards reconciliation had to reconsider their position, as neither free trade nor eased political relations have been accomplished 20 years after the conflict. There is substantial agreement among scholars that nationalism and ethno-­ national political cultures contribute enormously to explain the political issues ravaging across the Western Balkans (Ramet & Valenta, 2016; Ringdal & Simkus, 2016; Bieber, 2019). While I subscribe to this view, it is important to note that the first and foremost peril to avoid in our effort to reconnect the diffusion of nationalism with the various political predicaments in the region is that of treating nationalism and ethnicity as sort of natural, inescapable forces (Bieber, 2019, 2). Even more so now that the same ideology has regained footholds also in many countries around the globe in tandem with the multifarious phenomenon known as “populism”. As argued by Tamir (2019, 11), who in her book proposes a rather positive reading of it, “nationalism has always been part of the modern political world, at times occupying the back seat, at others the front row”. Nationalism is a fluid and versatile ideology that has several fields of application as well as various degrees of intensity. Therefore, it becomes more relevant understanding the determinants behind the different appeal exerted by nationalism across time and space. In theoretical terms, nationalism is fundamentally a claim pursuing the congruence of state and nation, the former consisting of the institutional architecture and the latter responding to identity and ethno-cultural definitions of its inhabitants. Nationalism is thus a demand – when the aspired nation-state does not exist – while in existing nation-states, it is a political narrative that upholds divisions and protection measures against existential threats (especially in multi-ethnic societies). In these terms, nationalism cannot be considered by any means democratic, namely, open to plurality: in fact, even though at its best nationalism requires faith and uncompromising loyalty to the nation  – which are not necessarily negative attributes – it promotes also a culture of suspicion, segregation, and in the worst cases hate against “what is perceived to be foreign, whether another nation, an immigrant, or a person who may practise another religion or speak a different language” (Grosby, 2005, 5). In the Western Balkans, nationalism is certainly not a determinant for political regimes as it has been in the 1990s, yet we can distinguish two forms in which nationalistic ideologies still matter for contemporary politics: one is animated by political parties that advance specific ethno-nationalist positions. Think of the use of nationalistic rhetoric by the Democratic Front in Montenegro, by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE) in North Macedonia, or again by Milorad Dodik’s Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) in Republika Srpska. In cases like these ones, nationalism holds an exclusionary potential that may target variously defined groups, especially ethnic groups that display specific cultural, religious, and identity features. For this reason, besides nationalism, I find reasonable to talk more specifically about ethno-politics, to denote exactly the mobilization of/ against specific ethnicities for political purposes, which can take place even within the borders of the same nation. Ethno-politics focuses on the reification of ethnic

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categories, a process that takes place when cultural identities are naturalized and fixed, conceived as immutable and used as basic political units. The normalization of ethnicity, in the recent history of the Western Balkans, has been heavily influenced by external actors, like the international community and later the EU that have involuntarily provided ethnicity with new opportunities to be reinforced at the state level. The intervention of the international community in the Balkans to end the war in the 1990s has introduced an institutional imprinting bearing important consequences for the whole region. I believe that this becomes particularly evident in the institutional arrangement of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Dayton Constitution (1995), which was of course successful in bringing peace to the country, has ingrained a consociational understanding of the society that has fixed ethnic categories through a mix of instruments such as the rotating three-member presidency among a Bosniak and a Croat elected from the Federation and a Serb elected from the Republika Srpska; the veto powers in the parliaments; and the ethnic quotas applied at all levels of government as well as in the civil service (Cooley, 2013, 7). In fact, nationalism and ethnic divisions were seen at the time as unavoidable given of societies, and therefore the need to preserve group identities prevailed over substantial attempts at transforming ethnic relations. In such way, ethnic groups have however become an established unit of reference, even more than in the past: they became the basic political unit to compete for relevant political positions in state institutions, in place of the individual. The ethnification expanded to the government structure, which counts 13 parliaments and 180 ministers established across the country. It is worth deviating briefly from the temporal perimeter traced in this book to consider the distortion noted by Paddy Ashdown, the late High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, at the tenth anniversary of Dayton (OHR, 2005): Perhaps the most difficult change that has to come in BiH before the country can join Europe is a change in people’s heads; in the way the citizens of this country think (…) The basic European principle lies in the fact that an individual’s rights are protected individually. BiH’s systems, government and even its citizens ways of thought are based on the idea that an individual’s rights are best, perhaps even only, protected within the group; within the collective.

In the other form, “nationalism has been an occasional and often pragmatic tool to reinforce regime control, but without a central function” to divide the society in sub-­segments (Bieber, 2019, 122). We retrieve an instance of that in Montenegro under DPS rule, where national-populist narratives have been useful to strengthen the ruling party, rather than as a mechanism for contending power (Dzankic & Keil, 2017). In this sense, nationalism is used as a platform for political legitimacy and as a potential precursor for more authoritarian rule. The privatization of the economy has not spared the sector from similar dynamics of ethnification: Kurtović (2015, 643) noted that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the people dominating the process of post-war privatization were the same “ethnonationalist parties [that] routinely appointed their own people as managers of state-­ owned enterprises” in the pre-Dayton era. At the societal level, the consolidation of this institutional framework came with expectations that each ethnic-based party

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would act for the benefit of its own ethnic group, to be then supported electorally so to ensure political leverage for the whole group. This bargain came at the expenses of far-reaching reforms that could attract large consensus or realize far-reaching change. Due to these mechanisms, many have noted that elections resemble rather ethnic census, because ethnic-driven vote is largely prevalent among the population and deviations are not seen as politically beneficial (Belloni, 2004; Cooley, 2013; Bieber, 2015). This results in a stark limitation of the democratization process, which is made even worse by the fact that minorities (e.g., Roma and Jews) are further marginalized in the political process of political representation.8 At the same time, recent analyses suggest that censuses provide citizens also with an opportunity to opt out of ethno-national categories and to reject the identities pre-given in the censuses form, which some are eager to take (cf. Bieber, 2015). Therefore, politics does not rely solely on ethno-nationalistic principles, as essentializing accounts at times seem to suggest: the use of ethnic categories in the relation between political representatives and citizens deserves to be explored in more detail. In fact, we may observe that the unconditional loyalty that ethnic-based parties expect from their affiliated electors increasingly works as alibi for the political elites to engage in practices of clientelism and accumulation of wealth, convinced that nationalism and ethno-politics take precedence over accountability for bad governance. This is a crucial element to consider when analyzing politics in the Western Balkans. In this environment, ethno-politics becomes a shortcut for political competitiveness, state capture, and authoritarianism. Think of the Montenegrin 2016 elections which were contended by 17 parties, half of them with a specific ethnic reference in their name, in a country with less than 530,000 people entitled to vote at the time. The proliferation of ethno-based parties in the Western Balkans and the record of corruption suggest that nationalism and ethno-politics are mobilizing factor that can be used by political elites for the sole purpose of political convenience. The case of the ascent to power of the President of Republika Srpska and since 2018 Serb member of the state presidency, Milorad Dodik, is exemplificative as well: he initially managed to win the West’s sympathy as moderate reformer, but turn into a more autocratic and less compromising leader, in a political environment that fails to reward moderation (Cooley, 2013, 191). Why is ethno-nationalism a political rewarding force despite its linkages with bad governance and uncooperative spirit? I argue that what we observe is a survival ethno-nationalism: in practice, the key aspect of ethnic categories is that they are well-oiled social aggregates within the social realities they are embedded in: in their political version, ethnic groups are vote reservoirs, and ethnic-based parties have gained a considerable power of allocating resources formally and informally to co-­ ethnics. According to Gjoni (2018, 60): “people tend to vote for political parties and politicians form their own ethnic group expecting them to defend their interest 8  See, for example, the results of the 2018 Regional Roma Survey, supported by the European Commission and implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank (https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/news_corner/news/despite-someprogress-marginalized-roma-community-still-most-excluded-western_en)

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against other groups and channel resources, jobs and other benefits to co-ethnics (…) political life becomes organized around ethnic blocs, government becomes an arena of inter-ethnic competition”. Beyond the sense of identity in itself, the public space is thus organized and expected to be organized according to criteria of ethnic patronage, of territorial repartition, to which the population adheres willy-nilly in order to gain resources for their own survival. The means of social redistribution have turned into tools for clientelism, and ethnic belonging has to be mobilized in order to access these resources that otherwise may not be accessed. Political elites have also learned to tame ethnicity for their survival in the political game: they have forged and perfected the practice of articulating ethnic demands to produce ethnic responses, for example, in the occasion of voting and censuses (the latter are also discussed in Chap. 3). Even attempts to change the political system may be pushed away in the name of unity against ethnic minorities. In doing so, they exploit the ethnic sclerosis that in some cases the international actors helped to create with the aim of pursuing various political goals and yet also to reduce their accountability for a number of other persistent questions: in fact – when asked – the citizens of the Western Balkans scarcely consider ethnic relations a pressing issue: in one of such surveys (UNODC, 2011), the most-felt societal issues are reported being in this order unemployment, poverty, corruption, and government performance, while inter-ethnic relations are towards the bottom of the list competing with concerns for environment degradation. In 2016, the evidence of a new survey by SELDI (2016) revealed that in Albania, the 40% of the respondents had been involved in at least one incident of bribe, gift, or favor exchange; 29% in North Macedonia; 28% in Bosnia and Herzegovina; 22% in Kosovo; 20% in Montenegro; and 19% in Serbia. If we link the dots of this various evidence, we may ask whether ethnic competition is a by-product across a region plagued by corruption as endemic issue, which flourish in an economic-depress environment. This is evident also in Albania and North Macedonia, where ethnicity occupies a smaller role in regulating informal everyday life dynamics. Reflecting on war-time nationalism, Bieber (2019, 2) contended that “while this is an important characteristic of the region during that decade, the wars cannot be explained by primordial nationalist hatreds, but the selfish use and abuse by political and intellectual elites to advance their own power, influence, and wealth”. In a similar fashion, ethno-politics today cannot be explained only by the appeal of identity or the fear of other groups, but also by the circles of power and the dynamics of economic redistribution that rotate around it. It has developed into a mechanism for survival and reproduction of unequal distribution. Ethno-nationalism often works as an instrument of mass distraction through which political elites capture and maintain control over state institutions. This should be recognized as another instance in which nationalism is used to consolidate logics of survival. Moreover, people politically affiliated with the ruling parties are protected by “a culture of legal impunity” (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2020, 5). It makes sense then to reflect over Belloni’s suggestion (2020, 14) to focus “on the largely neglected but central role of corruption in entrenching the rule of ethno-nationalist parties (…)

 Conclusion

21

contrary to the rhetoric of peacebuilding agencies, international intervention through its focus on ‘stability’ has legitimated both the rise of ethno-nationalists to power and the closure of any political space amenable to civic alternatives”. As the case of Dodik shows, regional leaders have learned to manipulate international actors, projecting outside an image of moderation and stability while perfecting autocratic manners internally. The EU and the international actors, frustrated by the slow advancement of the democratization and reconciliation processes, are often eager to accept this compromise in exchange of even a minimalist implementation of democracy: a condition that has been aptly called “stabilitocracy” (BiEPAG, 2017). Reflecting on the same matter, Damjanovski and Markovikj (2020, 59) conclude that “this soft approach by the EU towards these seemingly cooperative political actors has in fact enhanced their semi-authoritarian style of governance and enabled them to manipulate the EU bureaucracy and their Constituencies”. The way in which ethno-politics is being mobilized in the region does not harbor positive outlooks for the future. As I have just discussed, in the shadow of nationalism and ethno-politics, the Western Balkans faces still enormous issues of poverty and unemployment, which make their inhabitants prone to emigrate internally and abroad in large numbers, as we shall see in Chap. 3. With an eye on the future, the close connection between nationalism and economic underdevelopment is the most worrying trend in the region. Nationalism and its related aspects, such as lack of reconciliation and uncooperative relations in their present forms, will remain inadequate to address the ramping issues of unemployment and poverty across the region, both internally and at the regional level. They prevented or at least delayed reforms and agreements that could help in releasing the untapped potential of regional economies. By the same token, this political style contributes directly to deferring the improvement of the economic conditions of many citizens, who have then resorted to survival measures that include reliance on ethno-politics. Survival ethno-nationalism will definitely keep Western Balkans further away from the EU.  Not because nationalism is a foreign concept in the surrounding European space, but for at least two other orders of reason: firstly, because ethno-politics enhances the negative impact of patronage and corruption in the region, a problem that is raised explicitly in the EU communication A credible Enlargement. Secondly, because the logics of survival ethno-nationalism necessarily involve, as its reinforcing mechanism, tensions with neighbors, victimization, revival of ethnic partitions, and consequently fewer prospects for reconciliation. This is the spirit that, for example, has distinguished Dodik’s statements on the 1995 Srebrenica genocide as “arranged tragedy” that ensured “realization of plans of some western countries to put collective guilt on the Serbian people” (Deutsche Welle, 2018). For as much as the citizens and the civil society are attempting at opting out for this vicious circle, the lack of alternatives remains the key issue preventing a political breakthrough and a decided move towards the downplay of ethno-nationalism.

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1  Regional Geopolitics: EU Integration Perspectives, Nationalistic Revivals…

Conclusion The analysis provided in this chapter, focusing on political dynamics, reveals old and new issues that certainly matter for the future of the Western Balkans. The region is permeated by ethno-political revivals that find in the lack of reconciliation a hotbed for their restless societal reproduction. For both political elites and citizens, nationalism has turned from an ideology into an all-round force that govern everyday life dynamics, to serve causes that have less to do with grand political aspirations and more with state capture and clientelism. I referred to it as a survival ethno-nationalism. As such, survival ethno-nationalism proliferates in contexts of political fragmentation, scarce trust in institutions, and economic underdevelopment and often aims at maintaining the status quo. Moreover, it is mostly focused on providing solutions to everyday needs, resulting thus short-sighted when it comes to cast a future perspective for political actions. This is nevertheless the political landscape against which discourses on EU accession take place, and therefore the concept of intragmentation comes useful to capture the ambivalent dynamic through which fragmentation does not exclude integration on a broader scale. All indications suggest that this condition will likely remain a defining feature of the region for the near future. Nationalism represents a powerful yet divisive tool for governance, and the reasons why it is so prevalent is that the regional societies are in effect divided on political and socio-economic lines. The vast presence in the region of people that have been “left behind”, such as the marginalized, the unemployed, and those that are out of clientelistic networks, does not help the process of overcoming neither past divisions nor present challenges, such as the inflow of asylum seekers, which is rather characterized by scarce coordination and reliance on EU’s intervention. For these individuals, the ethnic partitions of the society may represent a way out or, even, a way forward to find opportunities to ameliorate their life conditions. Finally, it is important to note that from the EU perspective, the presence in the region of various global powers represent a source of potential fragmentation of interests and of opportunities for influence. Despite that, the activities of Russia, China, and the USA are not against the EU accession perspective: in many ways, they indirectly support it and contribute to Brussels’ high attention on the region. Or, in the way in which Macron has described enlargement into the Western Balkans: “a key factor of peace and stability on our continent”, ensuring that the region does not move “towards either Russia or Turkey, or towards authoritarian powers that don’t currently uphold our values”.9

 See https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldintrel/53/5307.htm

9

Chapter 2

Embedding the Regional Market?

Economies in Transition The second chapter of the book investigates the economic futures of the Western Balkans. For this purpose, the examination of the political aspects carried out in the previous chapter will prove very useful to explain some apparent contradictions as well as issues that are not directly captured by statistics and economic figures. One example: why, despite the overall macroeconomic stabilization, the WB6 are still lagging behind in the path to become high-income countries? My answer here is that it depends to a great extent on leaders and institutions, which are the key actors that can ultimately enable regional entrepreneurs and companies to establish a closer cooperation  – subsequently becoming more productive and connected. Taking this consideration on board, the chapter is thus mostly concerned with identifying a number of essential dynamics that are expected to play (or keep playing) a critical role in shaping the regional economy for the upcoming years. Nevertheless, the first part of the chapter indulges on a modicum of economic indicators, so to provide a contextual background and comparative insights on the regional economic performance vis-à-vis the EU especially. In fact, we need first of all to locate the Western Balkan economies on the global markets “map” and to describe their main features. The economic context we retrieve today in the Western Balkans is the result of the ongoing transition process from socialism to market economy, which started after 1989 (and after 1991 in Albania). It is worth remarking that until the breakdown of its regime, Albania was isolated internationally (it however received economic assistance from Zedong’s China), while the former Republics of Federal Yugoslavia had enjoyed considerably more freedom, and many of their citizens could emigrate abroad for labor purposes. The departing point is thus different, but at the dawn of the transition period, both shared a negative vision of the communism

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Zoppi, Futures of the Western Balkans, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89628-7_2

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2  Embedding the Regional Market?

and socialism they were about to abandon and a deep trust as well as high expectations for the Western Europe-supported economic reforms. In the 1990s, Albania begun to integrate in the world market, although the collapse of the pyramid schemes of savings in 1997 led to a new internal political and economic crisis, showing how vulnerable the transition to a market economy was. Both the regime change and the economic collapse caused a huge outflow of Albanians: some 20,000 reached Italy at once on the cargo ship Vlora more than 30 years ago, in August 1991. The transition in the rest of the area was interrupted by the military conflicts and by several rounds of international sanctions, which devastated the economy and disrupted the Federation’s market, with long-term consequences still visible in present intra-regional trade (Osbild & Bartlett, 2019, 5). At the end of the hostilities, the economic recovery was supported by the EU via budgetary and administrative assistance later formalized in the Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAAs), signed by all WB6 between 2001 (North Macedonia) and 2016 (Kosovo). SAAs are finalized at enabling signatory countries to establish close and long-lasting relations with the European Union and, among other things, at granting preferential access to the EU for most goods produced in the region. Western Balkan countries joined also the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA), another important instrument both for promoting cooperative trade rules and for re-establishing trade flows in the region. The reforms promoted by the EU and the international organizations were anything less than shock therapies, as they included rapid privatization, removal of price controls, and other measures, whose implementation was often entrusted to the very same former ruling socialist political elites. More recently, these initiatives have stimulated other forms of cooperation that have displayed much more ownership on the part of WB6: this is the case of the Regional Chamber Investment Forum (CIF), inaugurated in 2017, which brings together the regional Chambers of commerce to promote the region as one investment destination under the telling motto: “WB6 CIF is the business community’s response to political processes in the region”.1 Or the new online Investment Platform created by CIF in the framework of the Berlin process and supported by the EU, the EBRD, the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC), and the CEFTA. The website “investinsee.com” shall function as one-stop online information center for investors interested in financial opportunities in the area, and it features on its homepage an encouraging and “rare” map of the region depicted without political borders. This is indeed how the business community would like to see the region against the ongoing political processes. Still, 30 years after the epochal political developments in the WB6, the transition to a market economy under the tenets of the so-called Washington Consensus is incomplete. So far, it has gathered less appreciable results than in the case of the Central European countries, which joined the EU in the 2004 and 2007 enlargement rounds and share with the WB6 the “same” socialist past.

 See the section titled “who we are” on the website https://www.wb6cif.eu/who-we-are/.

1

The Regional Economic Outlook

25

The Regional Economic Outlook Since the beginning of the new millennium, all Western Balkan countries have experienced a general improvement of macroeconomic performances, especially in terms of “GDP growth, declining inflation, a fast rise in foreign trade, substantial FDI inflows and the implementation of many transition-related economic reforms” (Uvalić & Cvijanović, 2018, 1). The 2008 global financial crisis has however deteriorated the WB6 economies, primarily due to the decline in the export demand in foreign markets, the drop in the flux of foreign direct investments (FDI), and the decrease of the remittances sent by the diaspora, which contribute to a relevant share of the national income (cf. Sufaj, 2015). The crisis was less severely felt in Albania and Kosovo, as the economy of both countries avoided deep recession and remained in positive growth despite the impact of the international events. Their relative less developed markets, as well as the fact that many Albanians had withdrew their bank deposit in Italy and Greece to send money back home, have been cited as plausible explanations for this difference (cf. ACIT, 2012). With the 2008–2009 economic and financial crisis, the rapid expansion of the Western Balkan economies came to an abrupt end. Structural reforms linked to the transition also halted or slowed considerably (EBDR, 2014). At the same time, the data and the tables reported in this chapter show that until 2019 the regional economies had regained much of the lost ground. And yet, the economic effects of the Covid-19 outbreak have been severe, leading to recession, significant job losses, and most importantly interrupting “a decade of progress in boosting incomes and reducing poverty” (WB, 2021). Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia experienced also deep losses in the remittance rates. After the wars and the Great Recession, the crisis induced by the pandemic represents another great economic shock in the space of few decades for the region, the EU, and the world. The analysis of the regional economic structures will help in clarifying the interconnections between the WB6 and EU markets and the trade structure linking the two. The issues discussed in this chapter do not bear though an exclusively economic explanation, and the reader may note that some of the findings discussed in the previous chapter in relation to political matters are useful also when applied to economic dynamics: this is due to the interwoven relations linking the two spheres and to the fact that several obstacles to economic development find their roots exactly in political motives. As a significant departing point for this analysis, we should consider that the economies of the region present similarities that allow to carry on a common description of their economic features while minimizing the risk of misrepresentation (Kaloyanchev et al., 2018). Therefore, here below I highlight the main common features and convergence realized by Western Balkan economies: Small Size  To start with, all Western Balkan economies are relatively small in size, as the entire region forms a regional market of just around 18–20 million consumers. We may talk of “small size” also with reference to the gross domestic product

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Table 2.1  Gross domestic product at market prices (million euro) Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Kosovo Montenegro North Macedonia Serbia EU27*

2008 8800.3 13,047.8 3537.6 3103.3 6772.1 35,712.5 11,082,841.0

2020 12,991.7 17,383.0 6804.2 4193.2 10,766.3 46,467.5 13,348,749.0

Variation +47.6% +33.2% +92.3% +35.1% +59.0% +30.1% +20.4%

Source: Eurostat (2021). Dataset NAMA_10_GDP (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/ view/nama_10_gdp/default/table?lang=en). *In 2008, not including Croatia

(GDP): in fact, the six countries register altogether a GDP that scores just above that of Slovakia, a country with one-third of the population.2 Gross Domestic Product  Since 2008, the GDP at market prices of WB countries has increased on average by around 45% – a rate higher than the EU average – with a peak of more than 90% registered in Kosovo (Table 2.1). As anticipated, with the sole exception of Serbia, the recorded GDP in 2020 is slightly lower than the previous year, due to the effects of the pandemic. The service sector contributes for the most part to compose the regional GDP, and the majority of exports of services come from tourism and transport. Particularly positive trade balances in services are realized in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro. However, due to the difference in population, it is important to reflect on these data in per capita terms as well. Therefore, in the next table, I have reported Eurostat data about the GDP per capita for those countries with reliable statistics, again in comparison with EU average. Unfortunately, data for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are not included in the dataset because, among other things, the population censuses necessary to compile this information are contested for political reasons, as I will describe in the first section of Chap. 3. It emerges thus from Fig. 2.1 that compared to 2008, when only Montenegro reached the threshold of €5,000 per capita, less than 10 years later, Serbia and North Macedonia have achieved that result as well, while Albania is getting closer (€4,480 in 2018). From the available Eurostat data, we evince that the average regional GDP has improved by more than one-third in the period considered (from €4,048 to €5,820) and also that the difference registered with the EU is less pronounced today (it has diminished by -22.8%). With an approximate calculation, based on World Bank data, we may guesstimate Kosovo’s GDP per capita in 2017 as €3,600, while for Bosnia and Herzegovina, the value of €5,000 seems credible. In conclusion, we may consider that the GDP per capita in the WB6 is roughly one-sixth of the EU average and one-tenth of the level achieved in the richest EU members in Western Europe.

2  Calculation based on available Eurostat data for year 2020 (GDP at market prices). The total for Western Balkans is €98,600 million (Table 2.1), while Slovakia stands at €91,555 million.

The Regional Economic Outlook

27

2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 0

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

35,000

WB6

European Union - 27 countries

Serbia

Albania

North Macedonia

Montenegro

Fig. 2.1  Gross domestic product at market prices, euro per capita. (Source: Eurostat (2021) Dataset NAMA_10_GDP. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/nama_10_gdp/default/ table?lang=en. No data for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo)

Untapped Potential  Regional economies are rather underdeveloped in relation to all the potential awaiting in the fields of trade, digitalization, and transportations to mention but a few. We can put forward at least three central reasons: the scarce and poorly integrated intra-regional trade, meaning low exchange of goods and services between the six countries; the low participation in global value chains, namely, the coordinated economic production, supply, distribution, and post-sale activities which would promote trade and growth also in connection with EU markets (Ilahi et al., 2019); and, finally, the ongoing abandonment of rural areas across the region, which is causing de-agrarization as well as the non-valorization of other sectors such as tourism and the wood supply chain, leading to the decline of local economies. Structural Limitations  Common challenges across the region are retrieved also in the following: the lack of adequate transportation infrastructures for people and goods (a condition that in many cases actually makes it faster to reach Vienna than other capitals and large cities in the region); the weak competitiveness; or again the economic reliance on the manufacture of low-value products. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index provides an indication of the quality of infrastructures and connected services (roads, railroads, air, and water): in the 2019 edition of the report, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and North Macedonia (Kosovo is excluded from the Index) scored in a range comprised between 35.5 and 45.7. Only Serbia managed to achieve a higher value, 58.7. In

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2  Embedding the Regional Market?

comparison, Slovenia reached in the same year 58.3, Greece 60.6, and Croatia 62.1. Similarly, the high fiscal and current account deficits across the whole region suggest that the six countries remain vulnerable to external economic shocks, which are emphasized further by the high “dependence on external financing and remittances” (World Bank, 2019a, 29). The export unit index reveals also that the Western Balkan countries are all over-exposed in a similar fashion to price fluctuations on the global market.3 Labor Market  The situation of the labor markets in the WB6 is far from ideal (see Table 2.2): the unemployment rate is high – among the highest in Europe – although the rate has declined considerably since the early 2010s. It has been noted that unemployment was partly exacerbated by the post-socialist transition process itself, which through its liberalization, privatization, deindustrialization, and job cuts have increased the unemployment rate, reduced the overall standard of living, and created public dissatisfaction (Ganić, 2018; Gashi, 2018). In the table below, I have inserted the average rates of Croatia (which joined the EU in 2013) and the EU27 for comparative purposes. Besides unemployment, the volume of informal economy is concerning as well. In Serbia, for example, it is estimated to be around 20% of the GDP, while according to IMF, almost one-third of the Albanian GDP goes to “shadow” economy activities, slightly above the world average (Medina and Schneider 2018, 47). The review of the significant economic trends provided above helps in illustrating why it is useful to advance a common examination for the economic future of the region. In this respect, I argue that we may observe three major tendencies playing all an equally important role in shaping, if not determining, the future economic outlook of the Western Balkans. These tendencies can be summarized as follows: 1. Convergence towards EU economies 2. Increment of regional economic cooperation 3. Enhanced influence of external, non-EU actors Table 2.2  Unemployment rate, annual Country/area Albania Bosnia-Herzegovina Kosovo Montenegro North Macedonia Serbia Croatia EU27

2011 13.5 27.6 30.9** 19.7 31.4 23.0 13.7 9.9

2020 11.5* 15.9 25.6* 17.9 17.2 9.0 7.5 8.0

Variation –2.0% –11.7% –5.3% –1.8% –14.2% –14.0% –6.2% –1.9%

Source: International Labour Office, ILO. Country Profiles. For the EU27: Labor Force Survey, LFS (ILO). *2019 data **2012 data  The index can be accessed on the World Bank’s online database at https://data.worldbank.org/.

3

International Competitiveness and Attractiveness

29

The three tendencies underlined above are not reciprocally exclusive: as a matter of fact, we do see already the concurrent interplay of these three elements. However, it is pertinent to question which of these three is likely to become more representative of future dynamics, considering both the shortcoming of EU-Western Balkans relations and the persistent lack of reconciliation among regional neighbors illustrated in Chap. 1. It is thus worth asking whether new actors and new forms of economic collaboration will acquire a prominent role in this framework of disruptions and on which bases. In order to unravel the intricacies of each of these three future scenarios, it becomes necessary to take into consideration several elements of analysis, which at the same time complete the economic overview of the region and provide further insight on what we may expect in the future. This is the task of the second part of this chapter.

International Competitiveness and Attractiveness The globalization of world economy has greatly facilitated the movement of people, goods, and capital across states and continents, and the Western Balkans makes no exception as the entire region appears part of the economic global trends (Kóczán, 2017). Nevertheless, in comparative perspective with other transition countries, the region has not been capable to steadily attract large shares of global foreign direct investments nor to boost its overall international exports. Quite telling is the recent decision of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group to open its European logistic center in Liège, Belgium (contrary to earlier reports designating the Balkans as location): it may indeed be read as an indication that the area is still not considered fit for the highly competitive global economic game (Nova Ekonomija, 2018). As a matter of fact, issues of both attractiveness and competitiveness on global markets are still to be tackled properly: in the evaluation given by the International Monetary Fund, “a lack of openness, reliance on low value products, and weak competitiveness largely explain the insignificant role of trade and exports in the region’s economic performance” (IMF, 2019, vii). The negative judgment extends also at the level of national institutions, which are charged with critical functions like those of ensuring the protection of private property rights, the judicial independence, the fiscal disciplines, as well as the regulatory burdens. And yet, despite the need for solid fiscal rules, “their credibility in the region needs to be restored after they have been repeatedly breached in some countries” jeopardizing eventually the outlook of long-term fiscal sustainability (World Bank, 2019a, 3). This reduces the incentives for entrepreneurs to invest and for established firms to adopt more efficient technologies. Broadening these arguments, economic assessments on attractiveness and competitiveness are multifactorial and depend also on the external assessment given to the reliability of regional public sectors and to public spending; on the fight against corruption; on trade barriers; as well as on the available instruments to contain investment risks. All these issues link back more or less directly to the questions of reconciliation and regional

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2  Embedding the Regional Market?

uncooperative attitudes described in Chap. 1. Therefore, as I have contended several times already in this book, the chances to attract further investments in the future require a concerned, systemic effort aimed at dealing with multiple issues, ranging from infrastructures, to transparency, to good governance and cooperation. International trade suffers from few other structural limitations. Although decreasing over time, the management costs associated with importing and exporting are in fact remarkably higher than the EU27 average in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Serbia. Only Albania and Montenegro have managed to keep costs lower than in many EU countries. As for the first group of countries, the cost to export goods in 2015 was 44.5% higher than the EU27 average, while the cost to import was 37% more than the same average.4 The tables below help in figuring out the economic outlook of each regional country, to better appreciate the diversity of their condition. First of all, it is useful to consider the evolution of the volume of international trade in goods in the temporal arc 2008–2020 (Table 2.3). The table shows that, with the exception of Montenegro, all the other countries experienced a growth in their exports, up to three times more than the 2008 value (i.e., Albania). Imports have also incremented, not least for the effects of the increased purchase power, yet not at the same pace of exports. The last two columns, reporting the trade balance in 2008 and 2020, illustrate that most regional countries have ameliorated their balance over time. Montenegro and Kosovo instead display even more imbalance than in the past. However, while in the former country the variation is comparatively little (376 million Euro) and reflects the scarce development of the export sector, the situation in Kosovo reveals an upsurge in the value

Table 2.3  International trade in goods, millions of euro

Al BiH Ks Me Nm Rs EU27

Exports 2008 703 3432 196 416 2698 7039 1,420,800

2020 2190 5376 475 365 5778 16,379 1,932,200

Imports 2008 3796 8330 1930 2530 4664 15,489 1,554,600

2020 4859 8634 3297 2,103 7594 21,361 1,714,300

Trade balance 2008 2020 –3093 –2669 –4898 –3257 –1734 –2822 –2,114 –1,738 –1967 –1816 –8450 –4983 –133,800 217,800

Source: Eurostat (2021), Dataset NAMA_10_GDP (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/ view/nama_10_gdp/default/table?lang=en), International trade of EFTA, and enlargement countries

 Data extracted from the World Bank’s database Doing Business. The dataset refers to the total costs of a standardized cargo of goods transported by sea through four predefined stages: document preparation; customs clearance and inspections; inland transport and handling; and port and terminal handling. 4

International Competitiveness and Attractiveness

31

of total imports (+170%). In bilateral terms, Kosovo’s negative balance depends in particular on the imports from three countries: Serbia, Germany, and Turkey. From Serbia, Kosovo imports refined petroleum (13.7% of all imports from that country); flavored water (9%); electricity (6.6%); and wheat (5%) (Dogana e Kosovës 2020). Concerning the international trade of WB6, the EU is the leading partner accounting for 72% of the region’s total trade, while the WB6 represents just the 1.4% of EU’s total trade. Therefore, the existing and potential connections with the EU emerge also from the assessment of the volume of reciprocal trade (Figs. 2.2 and 2.3). The evolution between 2008 and 2020 necessarily resembles the trend of international trade, with Serbia improving its trade balance while Kosovo and Montenegro

4,121

Serbia

8,460

1,715 2,296

North Macedonia 260

Montenegro

94

Kosovo

1,169

737 2,446

Bosnia and Herzegovina 519

Albania 0

5,365

2,386

1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 7,000 8,000 9,000 2008 Export

2008 Import

Fig. 2.2  WB6 trade with the EU27, 2008 (value in million Euro). (Source: Eurostat, 2021, Dataset NAMA_10_GDP. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/nama_10_gdp/default/table? lang=en) 10,846 11,892

Serbia 4,481 3,516

North Macedonia 138 928

Montenegro

163

Kosovo

1,511 3,895 5,248

Bosnia and Herzegovina

1,635 2,812

Albania 0

2,000

4,000

2020 Export

6,000

8,000 10,000 12,000 14,000

2020 Import

Fig. 2.3  WB6 trade with the EU, 2020 (value in million Euro). (Source: Eurostat, 2021, Dataset NAMA_10_GDP. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/nama_10_gdp/default/table? lang=en)

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becoming visibly more unbalanced. During this period of time, the WB6 have overall recorded an export expansion towards the EU of some 200%.5 WB6-EU trade is particularly useful to note few things about competitiveness. In fact, given the proximity to EU markets, Western Balkan economies have certainly taken the advantage of being economies of scale specializing in sectors that are largely present in EU member countries, by facilitating the diffusion of both industry-­specific productivity and labor-intensive economic segments.6 A key driver for future economic growth could thus lie in the ability to keep developing, expanding, and linking to global value chains the sectors where WB6 have comparative advantage and specialization: in a recent analysis, these are identified as textiles, garments, tanning, and leather in Albania; furniture and wood and paper in Bosnia and Herzegovina; basic metals and fabricated metal products in Montenegro; machinery and equipment electronics in North Macedonia; and machinery and equipment electronics together with rubber and non-metallic mineral products in Serbia (Krešić et al., 2017, 7). The other side of the coin is that a tighter integration with EU markets requires greater investments, as the labor- and resource-intensive products use low skill and technology, in the long run confining the region to a less profitable market orientation (Sanfey et al., 2016). The next table helps in illustrating this point further as it reports the typologies of global exports and imports by main macro-categories. These categories are extracted from the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), a classification of goods elaborated by the United Nations (Table 2.4). As the last element of this section focusing on competitiveness and attractiveness, I will now consider foreign direct investments, which are defined as the lasting investments of a company in an enterprise resident in another country, with the former acquiring consequently significant influence in the management of the latter. It is argued that FDI are of specific relevance for transition regions, where they function as supplement to domestic savings and can be also a driver of enterprise restructuring during privatizations (Estrin et al., 2009). This is true for the WB6 as well, where the savings from the socialist regimes are limited and where infrastructures, industries, and new technologies are needed to boost the economy. Since FDI refer to enterprises that invest abroad to establish a new plant/office or, alternatively, to purchase existing assets of a foreign enterprise, they represent an important indicator for evaluating attractiveness. If we look at the most recent available data (Fig. 2.4), we may observe that Serbia (light blue line) maintains the lion’s share throughout the period analyzed, attracting in most cases more than half of the total inward flows of FDI in the region (the latter represented by the green columns). At the global level, UNCTAD reports that for the period 2008–2019, FDI in the WB6 have accounted, on average, for the 0.4% of the total global inward FDI. A rather quite low share: in comparative perspectives, WB6’s performance altogether  See https://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/regions/western-balkans/.  Notable examples are the outsourcing of labor-intensive activities for the garment production chain to Albania by Italian companies or the Serbian automotive industry, which produces components and systems for several German car brands. 5 6

International Competitiveness and Attractiveness

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Table 2.4  Exports by the first three groups of goods, as % of total exports (2020) Exports Type and share AL Other manufactured goods (61.7%) BiH Other manufactured goods (50.2%) KS Other manufactured goods (57.6%) ME Other manufactured goods (27.6%) NM Machinery and vehicles (33.0%) RS Other manufactured goods (33.9%) EU27 Other manufactured goods (39.3%) Imports AL Other manufactured goods (35.4%) BiH Other manufactured goods (35.1%) KS Other manufactured goods (32.1%) ME Other manufactured goods (31.8%) NM Other manufactured goods (42.5%) RS Machinery and vehicles (31.0%) EU27 Other manufactured goods (34.2%)

Type and share Food, drinks, and tobacco (12,1%) Machinery and vehicles (17.8%) Food, drinks, and tobacco (14.9%) Raw materials (22.3%) Other manufactured goods (27.0%) Machinery and vehicles (27.9%) Machinery and vehicles (22.4%) Machinery and vehicles (21.7%) Machinery and vehicles (21.3%) Food, drinks, and tobacco (21.8%) Machinery and vehicles (23.1%) Machinery and vehicles (22.0%) Other manufactured goods (29.9%) Machinery and vehicles (25.9%)

Type and share Machinery and vehicles (8.2%) Raw materials (10.5%) Raw materials (13.6%) Mineral, fuels, lubricants, and related goods (16.3%) Chemicals (23.8%) Food, drinks, and tobacco (19.2%) Chemicals (21.3%)

Food, drinks, and tobacco (17.0%) Food, drinks, and tobacco (16.5%) Machinery and vehicles (21.3%) Food, drinks, and tobacco (21.6%) Chemicals (14.3%) Chemicals (16.5%) Chemicals (13.6%)

Source: Eurostat (2021) Dataset NAMA_10_GDP (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/ view/nama_10_gdp/default/table?lang=en). EU27: trade with non-EU countries

is close to that of single Central and Eastern European countries like Czechia, Hungary, and Romania, as shown in the table below: In explaining the dynamics of FDI in the region, Estrin and Uvalic (2016, 458) have argued that “the Western Balkans economies have a greater need for FDI given their limited domestic savings. However, they also have lower levels of income so the region may find it hard to exploit the potential technological and employment spillovers from FDI”. This translates into low attractiveness to foreign investors. The issue is structural: the regional countries are too small to represent each on its own a sufficient economy of scale that can be noted by investors in the highly competitive and dynamic global market. Assuming that FDI will grow at the same rate that we have witnessed in the last years, only by the mid-2020s Serbia could reach

US Dollar, millions

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9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 WB6

Albania

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Montenegro

North Macedonia

Serbia

Fig. 2.4  FDI inward flows, annual, in US dollars at current price in millions. (Source: UNCTAD 2021, author’s elaboration)

16000 US Dollars (Millions)

14000 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 0 2008

2019

WB6

Bulgaria

Croatia

Hungary

Romania Slovakia

Czechia Slovenia

Fig. 2.5  FDI inward flows, annual, in US dollars at current price in millions. (Source: UNCTAD 2021, author’s elaboration)

and perhaps overcome the value of FDI that Hungary and Romania are capable of attracting today, notwithstanding the high fluctuations that emerge also in Fig. 2.5. The source countries of FDIs are prevalently European (OECD, 2019), Greece and the Netherlands in Albania; Croatia and Austria in Bosnia and Herzegovina;

Intra-regional Trade

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Turkey, Germany, and Switzerland in Kosovo; Austria, the UK, and Greece in North Macedonia; Russia, Italy, and Serbia in Montenegro; and Austria and Italy in Serbia, although the shares of Russia, China, and the Gulf countries are on the rise. The nature of FDI providers suggests that geographical proximity and specific advantages, rather than attractiveness per se, may contribute crucially to the flow. The short comparative analysis of FDI confirms thus that the region suffers from low competitiveness on global markets, to which contribute both hard (scarce infrastructures) and soft (lack of political reconciliation) issues. In particular, while the region presents some attractive potential for foreign firms, like cheap labor, the taxation system, and the geographical location as bridge between Europe and Asia, crucial constraints are identified in skills shortage, in political instability, and in the lack of transparency in rules and regulations (IMF, 2019). Hence, the Western Balkans will not become an attractive, business-friendly environment until the market is unified and the opportunities are magnified by cross-border linkages. The next section illuminates more on these aspects.

Intra-regional Trade Intra-regional trade refers to the sum of goods (i.e., all movable property) exchanged between the six regional countries. Trade with neighboring regional countries is a certain indicator of stable relations and harmonization of rules. To give some examples, consider that Italy’s primary imports and export partners are Germany and France. The top receivers of Dutch export are Germany, Belgium, France, the UK, and Italy. Slovakia imports goods mainly from Germany, Czechia, and China. Or again, Spain’s largest volumes of export are directed to France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the UK.7 Even from this cursory look, it is evident that regional trade matters, and in the specific case of EU countries, it may account for more than 50% of all trade flows. Trade, however, cannot happen in a regulatory vacuum. It requires bilateral and multilateral agreements regulating a number of matters, including intellectual property, protection of foreign investments, environmental regulations, health standards, and tariffs. In principle, the Western Balkans is not short of these: to date, they have engaged in many initiatives embracing virtually all levels of cooperation: since the beginning of the new millennium, we shall recall at least the Energy Community; the European Common Aviation Area Agreement (ECAA); the Memorandum of Understanding on South East Europe Transport Observatory (SEETO); the Stability 7  These information were retrieved on the online portal World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS), at this link: https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/ESP/Year/2017/TradeFlow/ EXPIMP. The portal and related software was developed by the World Bank, in collaboration with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and in consultation with the International Trade Center, the United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD), and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

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Pact for SEE; the European Charter for Small Enterprises; the Investment Compact; and the Electronic Southeast Europe Initiative (“eSEE”). Particularly important for the WB6 is the 2006 CEFTA agreement, whose goals is to “expand trade in goods and services; foster investment by means of fair, stable and predictable rules; eliminate barriers to trade between the eight Parties to the Agreement; provide appropriate protection of intellectual property rights in accordance with international standards; and harmonize provisions on modern trade policy issues such as competition rules and state aid” (OECD 2012, 11). CEFTA covers 16 policy areas, promoting for each consensus around the measures implemented, and it has proved relevant to bring participants closer to European Union membership in the case of previous 2004 and 2007 enlargement rounds. Despite the promising goals, it has been underlined that CEFTA has managed to achieve only partial results (Qorraj, 2018, 13): the efforts towards economic integration through the CEFTA 2006 have not increased the shares of trade within the Western Balkans at the expected levels, and the EU has remained the dominant export market for all the Western Balkans. Due to this fact, CEFTA 2006 could serve mainly as the instrument for institutional reforms in the Western Balkans such as: rules of origin, sanitary and phytosanitary issues, non-tariff measures and other important issues, and less for the increase of the export and trade between countries

In fact, intra-regional trade in the Western Balkans represents roughly one-fifth of all exports and a tenth of imports registered in the region (Kaloyanchev et al., 2018, 10). In other words, only the 10% of the goods that each of the six WB countries imports from abroad comes from within the region, while the 20% of what they export is sold to neighbor countries. In terms of volume of affairs, intra-regional trade comes second after trade with the EU, with the exception of Kosovo whose largest share of exports target regional countries. If we look at the major developments that occurred in the last decade, it is important to mention that Albania and Kosovo have expanded their exports to the region; Serbia and North Macedonia have been rather stable, while Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina have lost shares of the regional export market; on the import side, Serbia and Montenegro have imported noticeably less over time from neighboring countries, while Kosovo has doubled its import share since the late 2000s (Kaloyanchev et al., 2018, 11). From these more general considerations, I turn now to consider the two tables below, which allow to capture at glance the context of trade (exports and imports) between Western Balkan countries through the data collected by Comtrade, the UN’s repository of trade statistics (Tables 2.5 and 2.6). We may derive three key points from the tables above and the data available on trade: Serbia’s export share is overwhelming across the region, amounting to more than a half of total exchanges taking place in the WB6. The highest share of regional imports is found in Montenegro, followed by Kosovo. In second place, if we look at trade balance, we note that Serbia – with its solid export sector – has a positive balance with all the neighboring countries. Montenegro is in the opposite situation (cf. also Table 2.3), recording negative trade balances with all the other regional countries in 2020. The final aspect that is worth mentioning is the share represented by intra-regional trade on total exports and imports. For the former, we observe comparatively higher values, especially in Kosovo and Montenegro. Import values are

Intra-regional Trade

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Table 2.5  Regional exports on total exports, according to their value, 2020 Exporting countries AL AL BiH KS ME NM RS WB6 share, total intern. exports

0.4% 23.2% 3.7% 1.2% 0.9% 27.2%

BiH 0.6% 1.6% 6.2% 1.3% 7.0% 16.0%

KS 9.6%* – – – – 44.4%

ME 1.9% 2.8% 3.9% 0.5% 4.0% 39.5%

NM 3.2% 1.2% 9.3% 1.4% 3.8% 10.9%

RS 11.9% 11.6% 6.4% 28.2% 7.9% 15.7%

Source: Comtrade. Kosovo: National statistical office. * National Statistical Office. Data not available are indicated with “–” Table 2.6  Regional imports on total imports, according to their value, 2020 Importing countries AL AL BiH KS ME NM RS WB6 share, total intern. imports

0.2% 5.8% 1.9% 0.9% 0.2% 8.7%

BiH 0.4% – 5.6% 0.8% 2.3% 12.6%

KS 1.3%* – – – – 18.7%

ME 0.4% 0.2% – 0.1% 0.3% 28.5%

NM 1.5% 0.9% 5.7% 1.2% 0.9% 9.6%

RS 5.1% 11.3% 5.3% 19.8% 7.8% 3.7%

Source: Comtrade. Kosovo: National statistical office. *National Statistical Office. Data not available are indicated with “–”

rather diversified across the region, but a comparison with the case of EU members trade suggests that there is prospect for improvement of regional exchanges. In conclusion, the Western Balkans has registered already positive developments of intra-regional trade in the last two decades (Levitin & Sanfey, 2018). The question is whether the increase could have been even higher or whether the growth pace could be faster in the next decades. In fact, some challenges are still in place and prevent economic expansion to a considerable extent. One of them is certainly the costs associated with import and export, which remain comparatively high in at least four of the regional countries. International investors are certainly attracted by the respect for the rule of law and the presence of democratic institutions, but even more than those is the stability to be valued positively: the existence of reliable politico-economic partners that ensure cooperation and economic viability. Not all challenges in fact are visible through statistics alone as they regard in particular the persistence of trade barriers as well as other obstacles to fluid regional exchanges and mobility. Take, for example, Kosovo’s government decision to impose a 100% tax on most products imported from Serbia, back in late November 2018: according to the data provided by the Kosovar customs, in December 2019, imports from Serbia declined by 87%, with some products (e.g., sugar) reaching a drop of 100%

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in the following months. The value loss amounted to several millions of euro until the (new) government in Kosovo would completely lift the trade barrier in April 2020. On the bright side, an example of the initiatives that have been implemented in the attempt to overcome impediments to trade – perhaps the most relevant of the past few years – concerns the case of the so-called mini-Schengen later becoming known as “Open Balkan” initiative in the Western Balkans.

The Open Balkan Proposal Now that I have described the essential facets of the regional economy, my analysis continues with the so-called Open Balkan (OB) proposal, formerly known as miniSchengen (MS), which is instrumental to see in practice what benefits intra-regional cooperation could bring to the Western Balkans. Yet, the OB offers also a possibility to recognize the persistent volatility of cooperation attempts in the region, namely, that impossibility to have all parties satisfied around whatsoever cooperation initiative that I have characterized as intragmentation. In brief, the Open Balkan proposal is an initiative aimed at replicating the EU’s freedom of movement in the Balkans in the effort to establish an economic area that could foster economic integration in the area. The need for such an area is evident: most of the WB6 countries offer visa-free entry for holders of foreign passports having a valid Schengen visa, while visa requirements remain for regional citizens. In relation to goods, services, and capital, the continuance of long border controls, non-tariff barriers, and poor infrastructural connectivity remain problematic obstacles to intra-regional trade. Against this backdrop, from its very inception, the “mini-Schengen” did not refer to a special border regime within the broader and established Schengen, but rather to a parallel exercise of emulation that should get the Western Balkans closer to EU accession. Such clarification is not banal to make, since identical expressions have emerged in mid-2015 to indicate instead tighter border controls within the existing passport-free area in the Union. That was, in particular, one of the proposals coming from the Dutch cabinet at the apex of the migration flows along the Balkan Route (cf. Sterling, 2015). The mini-Schengen is in line with what the EU and the EU candidate and potential candidate countries in the Western Balkans have been discussed for the last years: in particular, the need “to accelerate regional economic cooperation” was recognized during the 12 July 2017 Western Balkans summit held in Trieste, Italy. All actors committed then to establish the Western Balkans Regional Economic Area (WBREA), which was described in the same meeting in the following manner (EC, 2018b, 1): The Western Balkans Regional Economic Area aims at developing an area where goods, services, investments and skilled workers can move without obstacles. It will scale up the market available to potential investors in the region: access to almost 20 million consumers from a single base, and opportunities to create value chains across borders will boost Western Balkans economic attractiveness, also taking advantage of trade relations with the EU.

The Open Balkan Proposal

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In the Trieste summit, it was clarified that the WBREA would not represent an alternative to EU integration. Rather, it would be instrumental for EU accession, as it contributes to achieve the harmonization of their economic and legal systems, as demanded also by the EU Commission document A Credible Enlargement Perspective mentioned earlier. The same could be said to apply in principle to the mini-Schengen, which became officially “Open Balkan” in July 2021. The challenge is significant: in fact, trade in the Western Balkans is negatively impacted by economic retaliation and trade disputes (cf. World Bank, 2019a, 40). Very often, such disputes are rooted in political tensions that are the legacy of the past and the result of open issues and lack of reconciliation. Jusufi and Bellaqa (2019) have described some cases of trade barriers involving Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo as well as Kosovo, Albania, and North Macedonia since 2008. The most recent case of trade barriers was Kosovo’s 100% raise of customs tariffs on goods originating from Serbia and Bosnia: allegedly, it was Pristina’s reaction to the failure to secure the two-thirds of the votes required to access Interpol for which the lobby efforts of the two abovementioned countries in primis were blamed (the decision was taken at the end of 2018, cf. Koleka, 2018). In addition, many companies operating in the region lament long lines for custom checks or for filling out phytosanitary certificates; moreover, such barriers have been also used as tools to put pressure on the neighbors, by making controls on truckloads tighter and longer (Instituti Gap, 2016, 8). The initiative took place despite the fact that all three involved countries are part of the free trade CEFTA area, which as seen came into force with the purpose of stimulating economic development and the EU accession agenda in the region. Evidently, the unilateral imposition of tariffs went against the spirit of the EU-supported CEFTA, but the decision was withdrawn only many months later, despite several EU calls to revoke the measure throughout 2019 and early 2020 (EU Office in Kosovo, 2019). The mini-Schengen proposal was launched in October 2019, at the time when the political scenario in the Western Balkans had witnessed another remarkable swing. In fact, it was then that France informed its EU peers that it would stand against the opening of negotiation talks for both Albania and North Macedonia (Baczynska, 2019). Such position was confirmed at the European Council on 18 October. This decision has drawn much criticism: apart from WB leaders themselves, the European Parliament also issued a resolution defining the block as “a non-decision” that “is a strategic mistake and has a detrimental effect on the EU’s credibility”.8 David McAllister, Chair of the European Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee, commented: “We have failed a test of the EU’s ability to deliver on its commitments when our partners deliver on theirs” (European Parliament, 2018b). The then EU Commission President Juncker too affirmed during the subsequent press conference that “it was a historic mistake” (EU reporter, 2019). In order to

8  Cf. the full text of the 24 October 2019 resolution at this link: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/ doceo/document/TA-9-2019-0050_EN.html.

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grasp what factors drove Macron in this direction that so upset EU institutions’ representatives, let us look at the following excerpt taken from the French President’s press conference on 18 October (Élysée, 2019, own translation): The Balkan countries, including North Macedonia and Albania, are carrying out important reforms, have sometimes carried out profound transformations with great courage (...). But very clearly, several countries were reluctant to open negotiations today. France was one of these countries, yet not to say that efforts have not been made or that progress is not there. But first of all, not all the progress required is there and we still have problems. There are, I could come back to it, inconsistencies, situations that are not under control with some of these countries on the migratory level among others, and on the respect of all the rules (…). I do not consider that the only relation that we must have with our neighbourhood is a relation of expansion or enlargement (…). We collectively subscribed to this strange spirit. It’s strange, it doesn’t work very well at 28, it won’t work very well at 27. I’m not sure it will work much better when we expand. I repeat: before any effective enlargement - here it is only a question of starting negotiations, let us be lucid - but before any effective enlargement, let us know how to reform ourselves

As it emerges, Macron’s concerns reverted primarily around the EU capacity to reform internally, rather than around specific issues with Western Balkan countries per se, whose efforts and achievements are indeed recognized by the French President. The position of the French President finds its roots in the multiple crises that have entangled the EU at least since the Great Recession of the late 2000s, like the mass migration flows, Brexit, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea – the framework of political fragmentation that I have explored in Chap. 1 (see also Zoppi, 2020). In Macron’s perspective, enlargement seemed to represent not necessarily the best and most urgent solution to current EU political difficulties. The mini-Schengen came about in the wake of the French veto and as a response to the slow pace of the enlargement process: the Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, together with the prime ministers of Albania and North Macedonia, Edi Rama and Zoran Zaev, respectively, took the lead of the “counter-initiative”. On 11 October 2019, 1 week before Macron spoke his words (although his decision was already known informally in Brussels’ lobbies), they met in Novi Sad and signed a declaration of intent to establish the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital. That was the dawn of mini-Schengen. The three leaders met 1 month later in the North Macedonian city of Ohrid, where an action plan to implement the MS by 2021 was officially agreed. A further meeting was held in Tirana on 21 December 2019, where the three leaders confirmed their commitment to the implementation of the four freedoms: the freedom of movement of goods, services, people, and capital. At the beginning of 2020, North Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who had been strongly committed to put the country on the path to EU and NATO membership, resigned in connection to the French veto and the stalled EU talks. In late March 2020, the EU managed to overcome the resistance of some if its members and eventually opened the accession talks with the two Western Balkan countries. In the same month, North Macedonia officially joined NATO, and after the elections, Zoran Zaev was nominated again as Prime Minister in a coalition government.

Open Balkan: Initial Reactions Across the Region

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With the new name of “Open Balkan”, in July 2021, agreements on the movement of goods, access to the labor market, and cooperation in the case of natural disasters were signed by Vučić, Rama, and Zaev and were made operative already in early August when Serbia sent helicopters for firefighting in North Macedonia. Moreover, the agreements included the mutual recognition of professional qualifications and academic diplomas. It was also jointly decided that the three countries will open their borders to each other’s citizens and products in 2023, without restrictions. Other aspects that may be implemented are the following: faster as well as 24/7 border controls for people and goods; mutual recognition of all documents issued by food and veterinary agencies; development of programs for the mobility of the students and the youth; and strengthening of police cooperation (Economic Chamber of Macedonia, 2019). The Open Balkan economic zone is not only a positive example of cooperation that may lead to further improvements. Also the process itself, which still sees Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Kosovo as potential members, is instrumental to reveal once more the overlap of economic, political, and social in the background of Europeanization.

Open Balkan: Initial Reactions Across the Region While the initiator leaders affirmed from the very beginning – and stressed it again in the Ohrid meeting – that all Western Balkan countries should join what was then the MS, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Kosovo have been far less enthusiastic, and even hostile, towards the initiative: this is where the region pays the toll to its unresolved historical legacy. As I have discussed earlier, the notion of intragmentation is quite useful to understand how the lack of political reconciliation undermines other achievements, even when the latter are at least in principle in line with EU norms, practices, and even expectations. In fact, divergences exist in the understanding of what is more logic, appropriate, and legitimate to do, due both to political tensions and to the differences in the EU status between WB countries. After an initial period of open skepticism, in December 2019, Montenegrin President Milo Đukanović joined the leaders of Albania, North Macedonia, and Serbia in the Tirana meeting to discuss further steps needed to make MS operative (Shams, 2019). Đukanović’s comment in the aftermath of the meeting suggests that the logics of consequentiality and appropriateness both help in explaining the political positioning of the involved actors: “Our goal is Montenegro as an EU member state. We do not need any substitute, but we support all regional initiatives that bring us closer to this goal”.9 The initiative, in other words, has to be seen as legitimate and beneficial to achieve the ultimate goal: EU accession.

9  From his official Twitter account, 21 December 2019. See original content here: https://twitter. com/predsjednik_cg.

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As a matter of fact, Montenegro has adopted already most of the measures included in the OB with in the CEFTA framework, and the initiative in its present form thus does not bear any relevant added value to its market configuration. Meanwhile, in August 2021, the newly elected Montenegrin Prime Minister, Zdravko Krivokapić, and Edi Rama opened a new joint border crossing between Montenegro and Albania, which was built with the support of the EU. A new infrastructure that may serve the cause of open borders in the near future. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s interest for the OB somehow waned after October 2019, as the initial support of the Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations, Mirko Šarović, has not been followed up by concrete actions. Among the regional countries, Kosovo is however the one displaying the most critical stance towards the initiative. The issue of the country recognition weights on Pristina’s reluctance to embrace the idea of joining a regional form of enhanced cooperation with neighbors that do not recognize its independence, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. To get a better insight on the matter, it is reported here what then Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaçi wrote on 9 November 2019, that is, in the day of the Ohrid summit10: As President of the Republic of Kosovo, I want to inform the citizens that I have refused my participation in the Ohrid Summit. This non-participation decision is based on several existing arguments. First, Kosovo was deliberately overlooked by Serbia at the First Summit of this new regional initiative. Second, Kosovo’s only vision remains EU and NATO membership. Therefore, we do not want in any circumstances to replace our Euro-Atlantic perspective with any regional initiative. And third, this regional initiative is meaningless as long as Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina do not recognize Kosovo’s independence. Kosovo is committed to good neighbourliness and removing obstacles to the freedom of people and goods. But Kosovo cannot be part of such a summit, attended by states that do not yet recognize the reality of independent Kosovo. We are committed to overcoming current obstacles through dialogue and mutual recognition. Only when that happens will we become part of such regional initiatives as equal states

As with Montenegro, Thaçi too framed the then mini-Schengen as an alternative to the EU: with reference to the Europeanization theories explored in the Introduction, this argument demonstrates that the Kosovar government considered MS as neither logical (in cost-benefit terms) nor legitimate (the right thing to do to access the EU). And it could not be otherwise, since the initiative finds among its proponents two countries that do not recognize its sovereignty. The situation seemed to have improved in 2020, when the Kosovar PM Avdullah Hoti met in Washington to sign in the presence of US President Donald Trump a non-binding agreement for the normalization of economic relations between his country and Serbia, which included also a pledge to join the Open Balkan initiative. Until today, there was however no follow-up on the points included in the document, and Hoti’s successor, Albin Kurti, has taken steps back from it, calling the initiative “visionless” for the region in what seems for most part a political objection (Marusic, 2021).

10   Link to original FB post: https://www.facebook.com/HashimThaciOfficial/posts/ 3157220934348244/ (author’s translation)

The Significance of Open Balkan

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Initiatives contemplating further integration unavoidably face political challenges that require negotiation and incorporation of political fragmentation. The various views on the OB expressed by regional governments are highly permeated by political considerations, and this reveals how important could be exploring also the diverging impact that the Europeanization process generates in the concerned countries. Applying further the theories about the Europeanization process, it is worth mentioning that also at the polity level, e.g., society, the responses of the wider public across the region have been fairly mixed. Among opponents, there has been fierce criticism towards the OB, viewed as a tool to: establish a Greater Albania, a Greater Serbia, or both (Nikolaidis, 2019); a new Yugoslavia (Hodzic, 2019); or, again, there have been accusations that the OB would benefit mostly Serbia and not the other regional members, a prospect that emphasize once again political rivalries (Gotev, 2020). Since the civil society and the population in general are able to exert influence on their governments, not least through political pressure and vote, the success of the OB initiatives relies also on the role that conflicting narratives about the past and bilateral disputes continue to have on intra-regional relations. On its part, the EU has provided material and immaterial incentives for all WB countries to improve their mutual relations and work on reconciliation more vigorously. It remains a prerequisite for EU accession.

The Significance of Open Balkan Even though the Open Balkan is supposed to work primarily as facilitator for trade between Western Balkan countries, the background and the context in which it was conceived show that cooperation initiatives in the region relate firmly to the EU perspective as well, as put below (Kaloyanchev et al., 2018, 20): The economies in the Western Balkans remain relatively underdeveloped and share some similarities, like a high dependency on foreign savings to finance investment and growth. Efforts are now under way to boost intra-regional economic integration as a means to promote these countries’ development and catching up with the EU

However, there is an inflation of regional cooperation initiatives involving the WB6: Ardian Hackaj, Research Director of the Cooperation and Development Institute in Tirana, counted 71 of those (in Maksimović 2020). One shall recall in fact that for more than a decade, CEFTA has contributed massively to regional development, providing a peace-building instrument and a training ground for regulatory convergence (Biukovic, 2008). Over the years, both SAA and CEFTA have worked in the direction of removing quantitative restrictions and other barriers, as well as to abolish custom duties between members, facilitating liberalization as desired by the EU (Kaloyanchev et al., 2018, 8). But, since political aspects continue being dominant, the results we see presently are ambivalent. On the one hand, barriers within this trade block remain possible due to a specific article contained in the CEFTA agreement (Article 23), which allows countries to apply safeguard

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measures aimed at protecting their internal economy and commercial interests (Jusufi & Bellaqa, 2019, 75): as seen previously, barriers have been indeed implemented at several points in time the last decade. On the other hand, due to the commercial obstacles, the EU remains by far the leading trade partner of the region, and Western Balkan countries in the last 10 years have increased their exports to the EU (+130%) more than the other way around (+49%). We can grasp further the significance of OB by going back to the theoretical investigation of Europeanization based on the impact at the levels of policy, politics, and polity (Orbie & Carbone, 2016). The Open Balkan policy initiative represents without doubts a positive instance of Europeanization in the Western Balkans. The visa-free border regime established by the European Union is the primary source of inspiration for the formulation of its southeastern counterpart, as acknowledged by WB6 leaders in the past few months and as inscribed also in the way the proposal has been initially christened. After all, full incorporation in the EU and thus in the existing Schengen scheme still represents the final aim of all governments in the region (this is also corroborated by the CEFTA agreement and the SAA). However, the claim that the “mini-Schengen”, later Open Balkan, does not bring a specific added value to the existing regional economic cooperation schemes is for a good extent true. Only if it intends proceeding seriously and definitely on the abolition of barriers, by implementing fast procedures and joint sanctions against transgressors, it could represent a major breakthrough in the region and advance the cooperation level. In terms of politics, I have described how, in the aftermath of the proposal, WB6 countries have split between those who see the OB initiative as an accelerator for EU membership (the proponents) and those who understand it as an alternative to the EU Common Regional Market (Montenegro and Kosovo). This dichotomy deserves more reflections. One could argue that the OB was presented as a way to impress positively the EU and to convince it about the region’s ability to accomplish positive results on its own, in a time when France had cast a shadow on the accession prospects for the entire region. The implementation of the OB will be though also a testing ground for those EU actors not yet persuaded either by the political capabilities of Western Balkan countries or by the authenticity of the cooperative intent of their political leaders. Macron may be in good company here: in fact, despite the green light to initiate accession talks, one must recall that the EU Commission stated in 2018 that none of the WB6 countries has met yet the membership criteria  – a reminder of how the EU assesses the achievements in the area. Therefore, the OB is certainly an immediate but ambitious reaction to the delayed process of accession showing some degrees of willing to cooperate. By the same token, it is also a ventured enterprise, for it does not rely on full support by regional members. In these circumstances, the initiative remains vulnerable to political turbulences and instrumental uses even now that has been formally launched. In these regards, it is of paramount importance including also the polity level: on the one hand, regional political leaders are accountable for the OB success or failure to their respective citizens, as the initiative is evidently connected to prospects of EU membership and to the idea of “deserving” the EU. At the same time, ethnic

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tensions, fears of new Yugoslavia(s), and greater zones of influence by some regional countries prevent change in the EU direction and keep old animosities alive. Hence, what does the OB represent for the Western Balkans’ path towards the EU? There are at least three final considerations that can be put forward. First of all, the designing and operationalization of the Open Balkan is a testing ground for the region’s goodwill to cooperate and overcome discords. Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama effectively summarized the position of the proponent countries (in Simić, 2019): Our aim is to be a part of the bigger European family, but while they are having their problems, we cannot be held hostage by the past or some disagreements… We are not the EU’s priority. We must make a priority, and not just between our three but between all six countries

While Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro may decide to fully join the MS in the near future, thus giving further legitimacy to the initiative, the firm rejection of Kosovo seems to be more problematic. In fact, the issue of recognition will keep affecting the political outlook of the region, being eventually diriment for the whole question of EU accession. Secondly, one shall also consider that strengthening trade in the Western Balkans could have positive repercussions for the EU, which could find there more interconnected and solid trade partners. This is particularly relevant when considering the Brexit debacle as well as the emerging interests of China, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and others in the Western Balkans (cf. Chap. 1). Therefore, in this context of increasing competition, the EU may be even more supporting of the initiative and change its stance on the WB – an instance of bottom-up influence on the understanding of Europeanization. This means, among other things, that the analysis of Europeanization is also an assessment of the EU’s capability of exerting its normative power as well as power of attraction on external areas. Lastly, I believe that the OB proposal provides an opportunity to assess if the widely recognized economic priorities (e.g., development, trade) are able to mitigate the political tensions and the unsettled issues (e.g., Kosovo’s recognition) and produce political change in the region: the OB may work as “a driving force for cooperation, development and social and economic emancipation of the nationalities of this region” (Jusufi & Bellaqa, 2019, 1). The impression is that the OB represents neither a priority nor a breakthrough for WB6 vis-à-vis other regional cooperation initiatives: it has an advanced policy design for market growth, but it eventually does not enjoy enough political backup to be implemented. Yet, the Covid-19 outbreak may have given new centrality to OB as an instrument to contain the deep economic depression looming on the whole European space.

 he Core-Periphery Model of Analysis: Still Valid T for the Future? Assessing the configuration of international and regional trade does not respond to the need of solving mere economic questions. Data on economic production and trade may hide – as with the example of tariffs – more complex dynamics. In the

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middle of the Great Recession that hit the Eurozone more than one decade ago, an observer argued that “the crisis is relegating the region [the Western Balkans] to the outermost circle in a multi-speed Europe – the periphery of the periphery” (Bechev, 2012, 1). In fact, the same crisis had already disclosed the different recovery potential between northern and southern EU members. For this reason, scholars and analysts started then to talk about a conventional division between the core group of better-doing countries, like Austria, Germany, and Scandinavia, and the countries representing the “periphery”, such as Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain (and at times Ireland, too). In this framework, some have classified the Western Balkans further away from the perceived core, in the form of “super-periphery” (Bartlett & Prica, 2016; Sokol, 2001). Whether the labels we choose to employ, there are some valuable considerations that we can draw from this and similar categorizations in use, especially if one applies the classic, radical reading of economic relations via “core-periphery” relations (Wallerstein, 1991, 82). I argue that this framework may advance our understanding of regional dynamics. A first feature of core-periphery relations in the European space is the unbalanced trade structure existing between the exporter core and the importing periphery, namely, asymmetries concerning the productive and export structures which have been exacerbated further by the euro’s institutional design (Matthijs, 2014; Zoppi, 2020). Given their cost competitiveness, the Western Balkans is increasingly seen as a key supplier of Western European markets and an effective location for European investors to diversify risk by spreading suppliers across this proximate geographic area. The relocation of economic activities in the Western Balkans under the neoliberal tenets has caused a process of deindustrialization and a strong dependency on external inputs for production and on finished products for meeting internal needs. Moreover, the possibility to re-import products without tariffs makes it viable to concentrate manufacture in the area, while profits and investments tend to be directed elsewhere, namely, to the core. Regional governments are discouraged from intervening to correct this (dis-)equilibrium, since foreign firms are crucial employment providers in their countries. Evidently, these endogenous disequilibria generate necessarily also a flow of people from the periphery to the core, be them entrepreneurs, professionals, or low-skilled laborers, in virtue of the attractiveness of certain areas in respect to domestic realities. In the context of the dynamics connecting the European Union and the Western Balkans, evidence suggests that countries in the former group benefit from the mobility originating in the latter, in terms of inflows of both low- and high-skilled as well as educated labor force – what is known as brain drain (Vračić, 2018). Emigration impoverishes instead the countries of origin, primarily in terms of skills, depriving them of qualified and eager-to-work individuals for the benefit of the receiving countries. Not by chance, in the previous section on attractiveness, we have seen that skills shortage is indeed one of the constraints to investments identified by companies: high emigration of experts and graduates in all sectors significantly reduce – when there is no return migration – the supply of qualified labor force available on the market, as cheap wages may deter skilled laborers now living abroad to take up the positions opening in the homeland. At the same time, the

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emigrants and the diasporas send back financial and other resources that can contribute to development at home, especially since remittances sent by workers are in many cases the largest source of external financing, more than aid and FDI. The EU’s undisputed influential position in the Western Balkan in what relates to politics, trade, and control over regional financial structures  – which by now I have sketched to a significant level – calls also into question the role of the EU itself, as it fosters further emigration from the area (Karasavvoglou et al., 2016). This consideration brings to the surface another issue encapsulated in the core-­ periphery approach: if it is true that migration entangling Europe and its neighbors is becoming more and more “ethnically and regionally specific” (Black et al., 2010; see also Triandafyllidou, 2013), it becomes relevant to reason on how the process of ethnicization of the workforce in the EU market can unveil existing economic – and power – dynamics. In fact, the risk of emphasizing ethnicity is that of reducing the analytical attention devoted to other relevant angles of analysis, such as the economic characterization of migrants and their incorporation within economic macro-­ regional systems that often perpetuate a condition of economic underdevelopment in the first place. Turning the tables on the discussion, we can instead pursue a more relevant approach by reconnecting migration patterns to the analysis of the economic relations undergoing between the origin and the destination areas and of the type of markets characterizing each migration pole involved. In this way, we may reconceptualize the Western Balkan countries as part to a system whose mechanisms, while providing opportunities for long-term integration and trade benefits, contribute presently to re-produce their status as emigrant countries. For these mechanisms to work, specific expectations of employability are reinforced on both sides (emigrants and receiving countries). This is how I suggest to read the documented flows of thousands of professional figures that move from the Western Balkans (and Central Europe) to Central and Northern Europe, in search for better economic opportunities: Bulgarian agronomists and peasants (Traikova et al., 2018); Bosnian doctors and nurses (Vračić, 2018); Albanian academic staff (Gëdeshi & King, 2018); Romanian and Macedonian loggers and lumberjacks (Andreatta, 2016); and domestic workers from all over Eastern Europe (Gallo & Scrinzi, 2017). Therefore, the merits of incorporating the core-periphery approach in this study are twofold: keeping the focus on the processes that reproduce unequal societal relationships between the two areas and overcoming the well-known epistemological limitations brought by essentializing understandings of culture and ethnicity as well as imagination processes that have often portrayed the area as the “other” in respect to core Europe (Hayden, 2013; Jovic, 2001; Marinov, 2013; Todorova, 2009). Moreover, the same type of discourse has proved to be relevant in order to explain also why certain groups, which are believed to have the human capital required to fill specific labor gaps, are tolerated abroad even if irregulars (e.g., domestic, care workers, land laborers in certain countries), while other groups are mostly rejected or targeted as undeserving of the access to social rights in public debates (Ambrosini, 2018, 22). Is the core-periphery structure likely to remain an appropriate framework also for the future? I believe that the economic indications gathered in this chapter lead

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to the conclusion that reasoning in terms of core-periphery will be still relevant in the future. Further integration within the value chain in the EU, in the presence of obstacles to trade between WB6, will not alter the nature of the relation. In addition, the conditions suffered by the peripheral end are at the basis of the social malaise that indeed one retrieves in the Western Balkans, as we will have the chance to see in the next chapter. What will be increasingly manifest to the entrepreneurial environment in the region is that the most significant reasons for perpetuating the periphery condition are endogenous or, at least, could be alleviated with endogenous solutions: practices of the informal sector, corruption, political instability, tax rates, and poor infrastructures are the key obstacles for economic development reported by firms (Krešić et al., 2017). Such limitations discourage even the investments or return of the Western Balkan diaspora, which could mitigate the effects of the brain drain and the lack of skills.

Non-EU Actors and the Challenges to EU Convergence To conclude the economic analysis, I briefly discuss the challenges inherent to the economic initiatives of non-EU actors in the Western Balkans. In Chap. 1, I have explained the various political interests linked to the activities of China, Russia, the Arab Gulf states, and Turkey in the region. Few things can be noted also at the economic level. I argue that is mainly the EU that has something to lose from the configuration of interests in the making within the Western Balkans. The main backlash is in fact that the difference in values and models of governance that each actor avails of when interacting with the region may discourage EU’s efforts and incentives to democratize the region. One can retrieve traces of this concern spelled out in the documents of the EU Parliament, as, for example, in the following excerpt from the study Serbia cooperation with China, the EU, Russia and the USA (European Parliament, 2017, 23): China has not established any political conditionality on its aid, at least not in terms of movement towards a specific concept (i.e. ‘rule of law’), preferring to disburse funds as an investment on Chinese interests rather than encouraging a specific behavior on the part of the Serbian authorities

In other words, China proposes “untied” loans that are not bound to pursuing specific objectives (e.g., improving the democratization record), which may thus result in the eyes of regional governments less demanding than fulfilling the EU conditionality. However, the investments of external actors often do not even comply to EU financial rules, and the lack of transparency in public procurements is a case in point. In its 2019 Communication on EU Enlargement Policy, the EU Commission underlined that “the control mechanisms throughout the procurement process need to be strengthened and transparency significantly increased through robust and ambitious measures” (EC, 2019b, 4). Forbes’ account on the topic is relevant as well (Shepard, 2017):

Non-EU Actors and the Challenges to EU Convergence

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Hungary and Serbia both have track records of engaging in large infrastructure projects without offering public tenders. The former was the recipient of Brussels’s ire in 2014 when it granted a $13 billion Russia-funded nuclear power plant project to a Russian company without making the bidding public, while Serbia has come under a large amount of internal criticism for just giving the Belgrade Waterfront Project to a company from Abu Dhabi without any type of public competition or even input

In addition to that, it has been noted also that China deals with Central/Eastern European countries in bloc, mixing EU members with candidate and potential candidate countries, thus promoting a parallel cooperation group that confronts also the sense of EU cohesiveness and the overall EU approach deployed in the region. The same strategy aimed at defying the EU as single actor and containing its expansion is favored by Russia too and has been a recurrent pattern in the last decades (Samokhvalov, 2017). What does that all mean for the future of the Western Balkans? On the basis of the evidence presented in the chapter, I argue that the six regional countries are likely to continue on the pendulum politics that has characterized for long much part of post-communist Europe. By swinging from side to side, the Western Balkans is in fact in the position to accrue competition between global actors and so maximize their benefits, by attracting additional, external resources they desperately need for development. The latest example of that dynamic was provided by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Serbia’s President Vučić in particular raised more than one eyebrow when he claimed that European solidarity did not exist, while China was “the only one who can help” (Walker, 2020). The Prime Minister Ana Brnabić went even further proposing to build a monument to Serbian-Chinese friendship, engaging also in an online skirmish about EU medical supplies with Carl Bildt, who has a long personal history of diplomatic and institutional engagement with the Balkans (Popović, 2020). Despite appearances, both the EU and the Western Balkans have exchanged acts of mutual solidarity during the pandemic, and the former has allocated funds to deal with the financial recovery. The Western Balkans will be certainly in the position to pursue such opportunistic approach also in the near future, because it has led to some advantages such as the launching of infrastructural projects, the inflow of FDI, and more consideration in external policies of other countries – while such way of doing is not in itself an impediment for keeping the integration process alive. After all, this is not very different from the dialectic we observe sometimes replicated at the political level, when blame on Brussels is used in a strategic manner by regional political leaders to reinforce their internal position. At the same time, the present and somewhat erratic economic dynamics in the region harbor two fundamental challenges with political implications: first of all, the promotion of democracy and more specifically its promotion via enhanced economic cooperation will advance only at a slow rate. The lack of transparency in public procurement procedures, corruption, poor intra-­ regional trade, and still comparatively low FDIs limit the chances of fair and equal redistribution of resources, favoring patronage and ethnic networks instead (Bak, 2019). Economic inequality and mistrusts of institutions, we will observe in Chap. 3, impact negatively also on societal cohesion.

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Furthermore, it takes to consider that China’s massive infrastructural investments in the region are based on loans and not grants. Therefore, for as much they have low interest rates and long maturities, such loans need to be paid back, most likely via part of the profits made with the infrastructures themselves (e.g., tolls; tickets. Recall here the case of Montenegro). This means, among other things, relying on users while ensuring proper maintenance over time. In the most critical readings, the Chinese loans mean for the Western Balkans “long-term political dependency” (Xhambazi, 2020). Yet, even putting aside this sort of considerations, there is clearly an issue of sustainability linked to debts, which in the future may require debt management plans or even the transfer of control over strategic assets to foreign groups.

Conclusion In opening this chapter on the economic prospects of the Western Balkans, I have delineated three major tendencies that are competing to delineate the future regional scenario: firstly, the increasing convergence with EU’s economy and policies; secondly, more dense intra-regional cooperation; and thirdly, the enhanced role of non-­EU actors for the economic development of the Western Balkans. The most intriguing questions are whether these three trajectories can co-exist and with what results. I believe that the answer to the first question is yes, there is possibility to observe – as we observe presently – simultaneous exchanges with regional and global actors. This is possible in the first place because global actors seem to have differentiated their range of action, avoiding carefully to step into the shoe of others. And secondly, because the regional landscape is rather fluid, open as it is to receive the much needed international investments. Still, the economic analysis pursued in this chapter concurs that “the Western Balkan region fall short of being considered a well-functioning sustainable market economy” (Sanfey & Milatovic, 2018, 2). This keeps many regional and international investors away and discourages initiatives from local political elites, since any investments at home risk transforming into a “gift” to foreign economies via emigration of skilled laborers or due to the structure of the production and value chain. Therefore, the interest of non-EU actors in the region should not be overemphasized, and their commitment in the long-term not taken for granted. Against this background, the EU has instead been behind most of the transition measures of the last decades and is promoting more neoliberal restructuring in the area. I have indicated that the EU economic approach to the region should not be exempted from criticism: there is a concrete risk of peripheralization and economic precarity in the way in which EU firms contribute to external dependency. The next step in the relation should be intuitively the full integration of the region in the financial stability mechanisms: this would be in the interest of all parts concerned and would send an explicit message about the recognized positive role of the Western Balkans for EU’s economy and security. Economic convergence with the EU (e.g., GDP) remains though a long-term goal that, on the basis of the presented data, will require at least two more decades and possibly more to be completed. On the way to achieve it, few strategic efforts could make the process faster: addressing

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internal disequilibria in the Western Balkans, for example. Presently, Serbia is in fact the largest economy in the region and accounts by far for most of incoming FDIs and both internal and external exports. The challenge is turning the entire region into a single, more attractive economic community where the comparative advantage of each county is maximized and integrated with the others. In this sense, the targets of extra-regional investments in the Western Balkans may turn useful to pump fresh resources, in a time when the EU is instead engulfed by enlargement fatigue. Data show in fact that there are many missed trading opportunities in the region. Ahead of this goal lie fragmented markets with different regulations and uncooperative attitudes. Considering how volatile many initiatives have been so far – and one may be tempted to include in the list also the mini-Schengen – the harmonization of the Western Balkans will require still time and will necessitate certainly further soft power from external actors. A separate discourse regards the untapped economic potential. In the few surveys available, firms in the Western Balkans claim to lose more than 13% of annual sales due to obstacles such as informal economy, corruption, and bureaucracy (Krešić et al., 2017). Manufacturing companies, compared to service-oriented ones, face additional burdens in navigating through customs and trade regulations. As efficaciously put by Linda Van Gelder, World Bank Regional Director for the Western Balkans: “Delays at crossings in the Western Balkans are five times longer than in many EU countries and trucks spend some 26 million hours at crossings in the region each year – that’s nearly 3,000 years” (World Bank, 2019b). Improving compliance and custom procedures, among other things, will change the firm environment, as more of them will be encouraged to export in the region, relieved of part of the logistic costs. In combination with the ongoing infrastructural projects, the expected impact on the future of these developments would be dramatic. In fact, the debt incurred to build them will be in itself a reason to enhance trade, both intra-­ regional and international, beyond existing political divisions. The temporal horizon to start seeing improvements is set for the second half of the 2020s: portions of the highways connecting Serbia and Montenegro are still under construction; the airport of Kukës will complete its upgrade in 2021, while a tender is open to entrust the construction of a new airport in Vlora; the inauguration of the Pelješac Bridge should take place in 2022; and the railway between Belgrade and Budapest will be modernized by 2023. As underlined in the previous chapter, these projects and others in the energy sector are made possible in most part by non-EU loans and non-EU construction companies, which are expanding in the region. In sum, the Western Balkans is set to boost regional cooperation in the near future through a variety of measures. Under the current framework, it is safe to affirm that the more they grow, the more they deepen their integration within the existing EU economic and financial mechanisms. Growth and EU membership walk thus hand in hand. Economic cooperation is instrumental to reduce tensions: practical benefits like higher levels of intra-regional flows of goods and services, reduced unemployment, and less vulnerability on the global market are in fact too promising (and long awaited by WB6 citizens) to be put further at stake. To reach this scope, the support from regional elected leaders is required together with a greater sense of ownership for present and future cooperation initiatives. This is by far more unpredictable and, as the Open Balkan demonstrates, at the test of reality results can be mixed.

Chapter 3

Socio-demographic Challenges: Migration and Territorial Impacts

 hen Data Are Political: Preliminary Considerations W on the WB6’s Statistical “Black Hole” Social aspects – although narratively emplaced after the analysis of political and economic dimensions – in reality are of equal relevance for the identification of the challenges lying ahead for Western Balkan countries. The social sphere is in fact filled with questions like depopulation, aging, and rural-urban unequal distribution of wealth and opportunities, that is to say: issues with an enormous transformative potential for societies. To put it bluntly, the big question for all the regional countries is how to make the Western Balkans more attractive for their citizens, so that fewer will consider emigrating in the future, whether internally (from villages to large cities) or beyond state borders. The identification of a proper policy strategy to address socio-demographic challenges is complicated by several factors. For example, investing more in education and training in the absence of a competitive national market may make people even more inclined to emigrate in order to extract the most out of their acquired expertise – a higher salary or a job of their choice. In the short term, social investments can thus turn in free-to-take advantages for foreign economies willing to expand their labor force. Moreover, social issues and mounting resentment are quickly appropriated by so-called populist and anti-system political parties emerged across the European continent and are often exploited in conjunction with other national-popular stances, ranging from xenophobia to souverainism and anti-elitism (Di Matteo & Mariotti, 2021). Suffice is to recall some of the argumentations made in the Introduction and in Chap. 1 about the way in which nationalism extensively builds on differences; in this chapter, we will further underline that the multifarious populist tendencies in the European space draw on pre-existing social tensions. In this phase of its history, the European space is in fact composed of expanding social peripheries and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Zoppi, Futures of the Western Balkans, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89628-7_3

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abandoned rural areas where disillusionment and social protest against the “center” are mounting (Brubaker, 2017). In order to reconnect all these elements of analysis together, this chapter is devoted to show what are the major current demographic trends in the Western Balkans and their social consequences. The necessary data to develop this chapter have been gathered by the author, mainly at the six national statistical offices by accessing their respective online databases or, in some cases, by contacting relevant persons at such institutions to acquire the additional documentation required. In several other instances, however, I resorted instead to the international dataset provided by UNDESA and the World Bank. In fact, after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the collection of reliable data has suffered a lot from both political and organizational issues and has generated a lack of statistical information (Nikitović, 2017, 67). This is how a team of researchers (Boulineau et  al., 2016) have summarized the statistical research context in the region: The demographical change in the Western Balkans is all the harder to cover by statistical means, as methodological problems are manifold for enumerating populations and comparing time series data. Minorities are underestimated due to calls for boycott at the moment of the census; migrations are underestimated due to non-comparable definitions of the resident population according to the different censuses. Where they exist, migrations data from the last censuses (2011) are not yet published in the majority of the countries. Vital statistics (births, deaths) are inaccurate.

Hence, the availability of data is per se an interesting aspect to consider research-­ wise and to reconnect further to the political intricacies explored in Chap. 1. There are two examples that are particularly demonstrative of the overlapping of demography and politics. The first case is the disputed 2013 census in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose results were published only 3 years after, spurring criticism on the side of Republika Srpska because a previous agreement on the methodology in use had not been achieved. There was much more at stake though, as summarized by Laurence Cooley (2019, 1069): A significant obstacle to conducting a census was disagreement between the representatives of the three constituent peoples. Bosnian Serb politicians were the keenest to hold a census, proposing legislation for one as early as 2004, since they expected it to demonstrate the extent of the Serb majority in the Republika Srpska. Parties representing Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks were less enthusiastic about collecting identity data. Croat parties feared that a census would demonstrate the extent of population decline amongst Croats, whereas for Bosniak parties the concern was that it would confirm the results of ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks from areas such as the Drina Valley and the northern RS

Consequently, in the occasion of the 2013 census, each group worked to maximize its own share resulting in the recorded population, by calling also non-­ permanent residents to participate in the survey. This precedent jeopardized further data collection efforts on delicate aspects regarding the country (i.e., identity and ethnicity) and has left us with scarcely reliable demographic data. A couple of years before this episode, another case helps in explaining the tensed climate that at times may turn statistical data into real political statements: the 2011 Kosovar census,

Overview of Demographic Features

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which was boycotted by the Serbians living in the country (especially by those in the northern area). The reasons for deserting it are profoundly political as well: the then Serbian government argued that since Kosovo was not a recognized state, it had no right to conduct a survey; neither its initiatives should be seconded (Musaj, 2015). Belgrade called therefore for boycott, keeping for itself the right to conduct a population survey in what was considered an integral part of Serbia. Political contestations hailed also from Serbian and Roma residents in southern Kosovo, shedding light on the fact that ethnicity remains a crucial criteria for identity politics and everyday consensus. This leads to the conclusion that the accuracy of statistics is subordinated to reconciliation and normalization of inter-ethnic relations, with all the consequences this implies for conducting analysis in the region. Fortunately, beside these two emblematic cases of non-cooperation, collaborative efforts do exist at the level of the six national statistical offices, and improvements in the collection as well as in the availability of data can be noted for all WB6 countries (SIDA, 2017).1 It should be recalled also that the EU strategically includes the achievement of an “efficient and modern statistical system” as part of the accession process: statistical data are nothing short that critical to assess the country’s advancement and alignment to acquis of the EU (Eurostat, 2020). In its latest round of country reports (2020), the EU evaluates as “moderately prepared” on statistical collection Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia, recommending the first three to strengthen human and financial resources devoted to their national statistical offices. Kosovo is described as having “some level of preparation” but still the “alignment of sectorial statistics with European standards saw very little improvement during the reporting period”. Preparations in the area of statistics in Bosnia and Herzegovina are considered to be in an “early stage”: as a matter of fact, this is the most severe assessment given by the EU to regional countries. In fact, some additional issues faced by the country are the scarce data exchange between entities as well as lack of a shared methodology for the 2021 population census round, for which “the country is not prepared to participate”.

Overview of Demographic Features What do available data show about the social configuration of the Western Balkans for the last 5 to 10 years? The findings suggest a general trend that the region shares as much internally in the WB6 as with the rest of the European continent. The same findings are also in line with those researchers who have recently argued that “the region of the former Yugoslavia converge, at least when it comes to the natural components of demographic change” (Nikitović, 2017, 61). To start with, the six Western Balkan countries are depopulating at an alarming pace, due to the combination of various factors. Depopulation, intended as the ascertained state of population

 The data reported in this chapter further corroborate the point made on improvements.

1

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decline, is in fact the outcome of both negative natural change and emigration. The former is the situation in which the number of deaths exceeds the number of births in the same year, while the latter refers to the act of resettling elsewhere than one’s country/area of origin. Moreover, since emigration usually involves the youngest cohorts of the population (I will come back to that), it affects directly the birth rate by depriving the origin territory of more fertile, young people: the fertility rate in the six regional countries is reported to be falling and in 2019 was comprised between the values of 1.30 and 1.78 (the EU average in that year is 1.56).2 Secondly, statistical figures report the incipient urbanization of Western Balkan countries, reflected in the growing share of the population living in large cities compared to rural residents. Even more significantly, in some cases (e.g., Albania), this phenomenon is further restricted to the capital city only, while the rest of the country is literally drained out of residents year after year. This dynamic of peripheralization, besides the most intuitive implications at the social level, determines also a broader issue of territorial unattractiveness, which in turn pushes even more people to leave rural or remote areas. Therefore, in conjunction with the process of economic restructuring, “territorial polarization” is another key expression we may use to describe what characterizes the Western Balkans, where few areas  – or just one pole – result more appealing for labor and life opportunities over the “rest”. Let us explore now in more detail the social aspects that I have mentioned so far. Total Population  The six Western Balkan countries have had declining or scarcely growing total populations over the past few years. In the following table, I report the World Bank population estimations in 2010 and 2020, together with the projection for 2040 (Table 3.1). As it emerges from these projections, by 2040, all countries in the area will have lost a share of their population. Only in Kosovo the depopulation trend will be somehow contained (−2% compared to 2010). The other five regional countries are predicted to shrink their population significantly by 2040, especially Bosnia and

Table 3.1  National population, projections Country Albania Bosnia-Herzegovina Kosovo Montenegro North Macedonia Serbia Total

Tot. pop. 2010 2,913,021 3,705,478 1,775,680 619,428 2,070,737 7,291,436 18,375,780

Tot. pop. 2020 2,837,743 3,280,815 1,775,378 621,718 2,083,380 6,908,224 17,507,258

Tot. pop. 2040 2,591,000 2,923,000 1,740,000 602,000 1,967,000 5,998,000 15,821,000

Source: World Bank (2021, https://databank.worldbank.org/source/health-nutrition-andpopulation-statistics:-population-estimates-and-projections) 2   Cf. the infographic available at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/news/themes-in-the-spotlight/ western-balkans-2019.

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Herzegovina (−21.2%) and Serbia (−17.8%). The projections made available by some of the statistical offices in the region confirm or present even more alarming demographic prospects. The Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (SORS), for example, has calculated that in the worst-case scenario, Serbian population may drop to 6,180,614 in 2041, just about the estimation of the World Bank. The Albanian Statistical Office estimates a population of 2,592,975  in the case of low growth scenario already in 2031, 10 years ago compared to the projection provided by the World Bank. A similar study has been conducted also for Kosovo by the Agency of Statistics (ASK), and – depending on the various demographic trends computed by the research team  – it projects Kosovar population in 2061 somewhere between 2,697,445 (high variant) and 688,847 (low variant), thus with concrete chances that the total will be lower than the World Bank’s estimation (ASK 2017). Whatever the future impact of the variables will be (e.g., fertility and emigration), what emerges from ASK’s projection is that Kosovar population as well is expected to age considerably more by 2050, catching up with the trend in neighboring countries. Aging  In fact, the entire region is embarked on a process of demographic transition towards an older populace. This is in itself a very positive achievement attesting the ameliorating quality of life; yet it generates also new societal needs, such as care, assistance, and higher public expenditure for which these countries may not be ready. In Albania, the share of the population aged 60 or more in 2009 was 14.2%, and it rose to 20.3% in 2019; the same thing has occurred in Montenegro, where in the same period that population cohort grew from representing 17.4% of the total to 21.3%. Similar trends can be noted for the other countries.

Territorial Perspectives As the statistics above suggest, there are good reasons to worry about demographics – or at least there should be. In fact, this preoccupation remains rather unspoken in public debates compared, for example, to the issue of external migration across the Balkan Route and the integration of asylum seekers. To make things worse, depopulation and aging processes across the Western Balkans do not affect territories in an equal fashion: some counties, districts, and entities are sensibly more impacted than others, for reasons that are connected to economic opportunities, to wealth distribution, or again to dynamics that we can ascribe to the functioning of the global market. In order to assess diversity in territorial dynamics, I will now contemplate the available data about internal migration at sub-national levels. We can in fact assume flows of internal migration as an indicator of territorial inequality, for reasons that will become more evident in the rest of the chapter.

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Internal Migration The analysis of internal migration turns quite useful to enhance our understanding of ongoing territorial dynamics. This indicator takes into consideration the quantitative difference between new registrations and de-registrations of usual residence address in a given territory. In fact, when a citizen moves to a new place of residence, she/he will in principle de-register from the origin municipality to register instead in the new town or city, mainly to receive mail, to vote, and to gain access to a number of place-based services. The calculation of the difference between incoming and outgoing individuals obtained in this way gives back the outlook of total residents in the area, year after year. This is the methodology through which the six national statistical offices in the WB, and for that matter most of the other around the globe, measure internal migration. The main issue with this method – it should be highlighted – is that communicating such address changes is not always a mandatory bureaucratic act on the part of the citizen.3 In other words, in some instances, there are no sanctions connected to the missed communication of address change to public authorities: therefore, the analysis of internal migration has to confront the facts that not all instances of internal resettlement are reported and that researchers are subsequently dealing with partial figures. The temporal availability of data represents thus the second limitation that comes with the study of internal migration: due to the need for elaborated and systematic data collection efforts, Western Balkan countries have only recently started to assemble databases of address changes reported on a yearly basis. In most cases, I will be able to consider data covering the last 6 years. In the specific case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there are instead no data available at the city/county level, but only at the level of entities (for the reasons provided in the opening section of this chapter). However, these limitations do not impede valuable observations, especially in combination with the other data I resort to in this chapter. With these clarifications in mind, I now turn to analyze developments in each country.

3  I provide some examples. The following is how Instat has summarized the procedure in use in Albania for tracking internal migration: “Transferring ones residence is a voluntary act done by the individual. The new Civil Status office takes into account the requests brought forth for transferring the files and send an notification to the old office where the original register is. Adult members of the family, who want to change their residency, first have to separate as a family of their own in the existing Civil Status Office. The internal movements, inside the territory of the country, are provided yearly by the General Directorate of Civil Status. The data received contains all the internal movements of the population, including the change of residence (prefecture) reflected in the destination civil office of the person. Internal movements of the persons which are not registered in the respective civil offices in the destination prefecture are not considered” (Communication with the author, 23 April 2020). In North Macedonia, it is instead mandatory reporting the change of residence: “the source of data for this statistical survey is administrative, i.e. the data are obtained on the basis of records/registration of the forms registering or notifying resettlement or removal, which are completed by competent offices in the Ministry of Interior” (Communication with the author, 4 May 2020).

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Albania  The first national case I analyze in detail, Albania, is quite revealing of ongoing transformations. Albania is administratively composed of 12 counties (qark) that have replaced former districts since the 1998 constitution. Taking into consideration the last 6 available years (2014–2019), we observe that out of the 12 counties, only 2 present a positive migration balance for each of these years and thus for the entire period. This is the case of the capital city Tirana and the coastal city of Durrës. All the other counties are reported having negative trends (more de-­ registrations than new registrations) for each of the years included in the time span. These two counties gather together more than 41% of the total national population – despite being among the least extended geographically (jointly taken, they reach just 8.4% of the total territorial area). In the opposite demographic situation, we find the county of Dibër: in the period 2014–2019, the net of resident population recorded −12.790 people, a contraction of more than 10% of total residents. This makes of Dibër the fastest shrinking Albanian county in the last years. The first thing we may want to start from on the way to understand Albania’s territorial differences is Dibër’s topography: this county is among the most mountainous of the entire Albania and also the place where the highest national peak is indeed found (Mount Korab, 2,764 m.). As we shall see, this is not by any means a banal feature to consider. Quite the opposite, hilly and mountainous areas across Europe are recurrently associated with fewer economic opportunities as well as lack of services. In the case of Dibër, this is visible, among other things, in the type of economic activities practiced in the county: these are prevalently linked to agriculture, forestry, and mining, while they only scarcely deal with trade, IT and communication, and financial services (Albanian Institute of Statistics, 2017). As part of the problem, Dibër shows a poor development of the road network, which is considered as one of the strongest reasons for the unequal economic development across the country (Ramadani et al., 2019). As a result, the GDP per capita registered in 2017 in Dibër is considerably below the national average, followed only by Elbasan and Kukës, relegating them to a condition of relative poverty that has characterized these counties for more than a decade (Betti et al., 2018; Pere & Bartlett, 2019). Kosovo  The available data for assessing internal migration in Kosovo are limited to the period 2015–2019. The country is divided into 8 districts (Albanian, rajone; Serbian, окрузи/okruzi) and 38 municipalities. Given the small size of the country, I will consider statistics at the municipality level. Kosovo is another stark example of “territorial polarization”: in terms of internal migration, statistics reveal that less than one-third of the municipalities (11) have grown their resident population, ranging from very small increases (e.g., +10 residents in Ranillug) to more remarkable ones (+5,393 in capital Prishtinë) and in the two other largest municipal areas in Kosovo: Prizren and Ferizaj. However, it should be stressed again that these data consider only the balance of internal migration. When we apply to calculations the overall balance (inclusive of those who emigrate abroad), numbers change drastically, with only five municipalities displaying a positive balance (Graçanicë, Novobërdë, Kllokot, Ranillug e Partesh): even Prishtinë now plunges to −2,474 in the period 2015–2019. The condition of rural areas in Kosovo resembles very

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closely that seen in Albania, although road development and maintenance are comparatively poorer than in the other regional countries. Moreover, rural-to-urban migration and international migration have the effect of causing a “lack of inputs, manpower and equipment, and the lack of farm profitability” in rural areas (Sauer et al., 2018, 217). The challenge of releasing the untapped economic potential starts thus from the countryside. North Macedonia  The territory of North Macedonia is divided in eight statistical regions (Eastern, Northeastern, Pelagonia, Polog, Skopje, Southeastern, Southwestern, Vardar). During the period 2014–2018, only the capital Skopje region has accrued its total resident population (+ 4,978). All other regions present negative net balances throughout the 5-year span. As confirmed in the 2019 report of the State statistical office (MakStat), “the demographic indicators at the regional level show differences that point to a disproportion in the territorial distribution of the population (…) Differences are also visible in the number of births and deaths. In five regions, as a result of the unfavorable age structure and the low fertility, the number of deaths exceeds the number of births” (MakStat, 2019, 16). What is observed during the period 2014–2018 is part of a historical process of territorial reconfiguration in the country that involves also the economic transformation that occurred in the last decades (Madjevikj et al., 2016). As explained in other analysis, the process of relocation of the population from rural to urban areas, “from lesser developed areas to areas with higher level of economic development, with greater and various possibilities for employment resulted with a deepening of the regional differences in every aspect” (Madzevic et al., 2013, 46). North Macedonia too is thus exposed to the polarization tendency, with Skopje and Polog expanding their population and share of national wealth, while East and Pelagonia in particular are beyond the edge of population sustainability. Montenegro  For the small country of Montenegro, statistics are gathered directly at the municipality level. In the overall period 2014–2018, one-third of the total municipalities (8 out of 23) have reached a positive net balance. Among these, capital Podgorica holds the lion’s share of new residents (+5,692 residents, corresponding to 74% of total new registrations). The mid-sized cities of Budva (+1,385), Bar (+949), and Tivat (+510) are right behind the capital in terms of absolute growth in the same period. Quite interestingly, the cities of Nikšić, Herceg Novi, and Pljevlja – respectively, the second, third, and fourth largest in Montenegro – all recorded negative balances, one of the very few exceptions to the general urbanization trend. Serbia  Serbia is administratively subdivided in 24 districts (okruzi), plus the city of Belgrade that holds special status. These districts are regrouped in five statistical regions (Vojvodina, Belgrade, Šumadija and Western Serbia, Southern and Eastern Serbia, Kosovo and Metohija). Serbia does not exercise sovereignty over the latter polity; neither has released statistical information since Kosovo’s declaration of independence. The data on internal migration referring to the period 2014–2019 mark no diverging patterns from that seen for the other regional countries. Belgrade region has dramatically increased the resident population vis-à-vis the rest of the

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country (+34,952). The region of Vojvodina turns out moderately positive as well (+450). However, most part of mobility flows had as destination the cities of Novi Sad (the second-largest center of the country) and Subotica. Both Šumadija and Western Serbia (−20,515) and Southern and Eastern Serbia (−15,825) experienced remarkable outflows of resident population. Among the largest cities in these two regions, only Niš, Subotica, Pančevo, and Kragujevac have recorded more registrations than de-registrations. Other large centers, like Leskovac, Kruševac, Kraljevo, and Zrenjanin, present all in negative trends. Bosnia and Herzegovina  I conclude this section with the analysis of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which I am using data from 2014 to 2019. Due to the complex political framework, we do not have access to detailed information on territorial dynamics. The statistics on changes of address of residence captures only the level of the two entities (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska) and the Brčko District, an autonomous administrative unit, formally part of both entities but placed under international supervision. The statistics on changes of address suggest that the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, inhabited mostly by Bosniaks and Croats, has lost over time 2,767 residents, while positive values are attached to the Republika Srpska and Brčko District. We may then resort to other dataset to explore at least the case of the capital Sarajevo, which is located in the FBiH, the entity experiencing population decline. According to the World Urbanization Prospects series of the United Nations, in the decade 2010–2020, the population of Sarajevo is estimated increasing from some 342,000 to 343,000.4 In addition, the estimated urban population of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been steadily growing since 1990, having reached 49% in 2020 and forecasted at 53.6% by 2030. We may take this as a rough indication that Bosnia and Herzegovina marks no exception in relation to urbanization trends, although at a slower pace and under the effects of marked political dynamics.

Regional and International Migration The picture of “regional” mobility that we can possibly obtain from data, namely, the regular flows from one WB country to another, is rather blurry due to major data gaps and the lack of comparable statistics (cf. Migratup, 2018). On the one hand, it should be noted that state authorities do not always put in place efficient databases or collect information of this kind. On the other hand, not all regional migrants report the change of address to the authorities, not least because they might not be

 Cf. the data of the World Urbanization Prospects 2018, elaborated by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations (https://population.un.org/wup/Download/), and in particular the file 22 dataset titled “Annual Population of Urban Agglomerations with 300,000 inhabitants or more in 2018, by country, 1950–2035 (thousands)”. 4

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intending to undertake permanent migration but just temporal or circular mobility, often connected to seasonal or occasional job opportunities. However, the evidence at our disposal points to the direction of scarce regional mobility. This is not surprising, considering what I have argued previously for the condition of intra-regional trade as well as political and ethnic relations. Let us consider two examples: in Bosnia and Herzegovina, state authorities have granted some 67,400 temporary residence permits on the grounds of family reunification (most common), education, employment, humanitarian reasons (the latter representing around 1% of all cases), and other justified reasons in the period 2014–2019.5 Top beneficiaries have been citizens of Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, thus with a visible regional representation in statistics. As for permanent residence permits, cases in the period 2014–2019 have been limited (4.751), with slightly less representation of WB citizens: Chinese citizens are those who have received more permanent permits (681), followed by Montenegrin (657), Croatians (647), North Macedonians (422), and Turkish (376). If we turn to look at how many BiH citizens have cancelled their residence in the same reference period, the total amount is 23.754, of which the most has moved to Croatia, Germany, Serbia, and Austria. The regional flows are captured also in the statistics made available by MakStat, according to which in the period 2014–2020, there have been 642 emigrated residents (citizens of one of WB6) to other Western Balkan countries versus 6,283 immigrated (citizens of one of WB6) from other Western Balkan countries.6 Regular migration beyond the region is characterized instead by a very different magnitude. Eurostat data (2021) at hand, we observe that during 2014–2019 circa, 392,000 WB citizens have changed their residence to one of the EU27 countries. Most are Albanian citizens (112,200), followed by Bosnians (102,820) and Serbs (90,580). We count 97,000 further WB migrants by taking into consideration immigration to OECD countries that are not EU members (e.g., Australia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, the USA). Once again, Albanian is the most represented citizenship. A total of 122,000 WB6 citizens have left the EU27 in the same period: more than a half are Serbian and Bosnian citizens. As for OECD countries, the total of recorded outflows is around 30,000, of which 15,700 Bosnians and 7,000 Serbs.

5  Ministry of Security of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. Family reunification, employment, and education are in this order the three most common reasons granting temporary permits to WB citizens. As for Turkey, more than 70% of permits are connect to education purposes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 6  The dataset is International migration: Immigrated and Emigrated Citizens of the Republic of Macedonia foreigners and net migration, by country, annually. These are the statistics provided yearly: 155 emigrants vs. 873 immigrants in 2014; 103 vs. 1368 in 2015; 67 vs. 1034 in 2016; 74 vs. 852 in 2017; 56 vs. 879 in 2018; 55 vs. 1006 in 2019; and 132 vs. 271 in 2020.

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I rregular Migration and the Participation of WB6 Citizens in the Balkan Route In Chapter 1, I have illustrated that mobility outside the region has manifested also in the surge of asylum applications lodged by WB6 citizens to EU countries. Between 2014 and 2020, more than 515,000 applications of WB6 citizens were received by EU27, mainly in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. In the same period of time, Frontex claims to have detected more than 50,000 attempts by WB6 citizens at crossings borders irregularly along the Balkan Route. Almost the entirety of the asylum applications have been rejected, since the whole area was designated as safe by EU members. As a matter of fact, we do not observe any specific surge of violence and tension that could justify such number of asylum applicants from WB6. Therefore, we need once again to consider the economic conditions of the citizens leaving these countries as well as the desire to ameliorate their situation. The analysis of the reasons for the request for international protection by WB6 citizens discloses what are the most important problems perceived in these societies: unemployment; deficiencies in health and social systems; and opportunity to receive a good education abroad (Easo, 2015, 19). Through the information collected by Easo, we can conclude that there are also social problems experienced by specific groups: in the case of Kosovo, most of the asylum seekers are of Albanian ethnicity and to a lesser extent belong to the “Rae” community (Rome, Ashkali, and Egyptians). In Serbia, the most represented among asylum seekers are members of the Roma and Albanian communities. We also find the Roma community for North Macedonia and Bosnia, where they represent 60% of the total (Easo, 2015, 11–14). Asylum seekers from WB6 therefore considered moving to more developed European countries as an economic strategy to support their families and more generally to improve their situation. The Balkan route and the international protection represented an opportunity to pursue this strategy, whether through paid employment or/and social benefits in the host state. In another study, we learn that for Albanians “the allowance paid by German authorities for living expenses during the asylum period was a very important pull factor. On average the monthly allowance was 140 Euros per adult and 40 Euros per child. Housing, electricity and water bills, as well as medical services were free of charge for the whole family” (Hackaj et al., 2016, 13). In the same document, it is also reported how the decision to migrate in those days when so many migrants from Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and other countries were crossing the region was usually taken in short time, namely, in 2 or 3 days. The prospect of accessing allowances in Germany or other EU member countries for some time was considered worth enough to undertake the journey without much planning. This has not been the only pattern. I talked about emigration from Albania with Alketa Kuka, who works as Director of the Goethe-Zentrum Tirana. The Goethe-Zentrum represents the Goethe-Institut in Albania, namely, the official cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany, which is operational worldwide promoting the study of the German language abroad

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and encouraging international cultural exchange and relations. Considering the role of the Zentrum in a country whose population is so prone to emigrate, I asked her who are the people enrolling in German language classes in Tirana and for what reasons: Nowadays, foreign languages are usually learned for practical reasons and short to medium-term goals. These reasons are often study and work prospects abroad, better opportunities in the country of origin, private contacts, but also the desire to take on new challenges. In Albania, the desire to learn German among young people is often linked to a possible perspective in Germany.

Quite interestingly, she noted that the drive to learn the language is also motivated on new motives that are very telling of the migration scenario in the whole region: The migration history from Albania to Germany is now almost 30 years old. That means a higher volume of family contacts and second-generation migrants who were born and raised in Germany. We at Goethe-Zentrum have a new group of students that is learning German with an objective that is new to us: Albanian grandparents who are learning German in order to speak to their grandchildren born in Germany in their mother tongue

Pre-integration courses and intercultural training are certainly needed services to make it easier for migrants to start a new life in Germany. However, not all activities involving German language are meant for emigrants. As Kuka further explains: For returnees offers are created in cooperation with partners that aim to enable these people and their families to reintegrate better and faster in their home country, taking into account the knowledge acquired in Germany. An important focus at the moment is the prevention of brain drain. For this reason in cooperation with partners offers for vocational schools are being designed that promote the employment of graduates in the local job market.

The set of quotations above have helped in clarifying that emigration to the EU remains a solid aspiration of many WB6 citizens (in our examples Albanians specifically) that manifested both in the form of the hasty decision taken in the middle of the long marches along the Balkan Route and as a more reasoned, planned endeavor that included the study of the language. The labor market situation in the Western Balkan countries, and not humanitarian reasons, continues to represent the most significant driving factor for emigration. This is not surprising, considering that unemployment remains relatively high although generally improving compared to the previous decade (as seen in Chap. 2). Even if no particular ethnic tensions or violence have been recorded in recent years, it is important to consider that access to the labor market for some minorities is probably more demanding and more subjected to discriminatory phenomena than what data on unemployment suggest (Kruta, 2019, 206). Although it is not easy to estimate the weight of economic issues on the decision to migrate, they seem to be intertwined with the persistent problem of minorities in the Balkans.

Inequality, Corruption, and Protest

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Inequality, Corruption, and Protest As the final section of this chapter, I find it important looking into the relation between inequality, corruption, and the escalation of protests in the Western Balkans. The analysis of social protests can be approached with the same logic that I have proposed throughout the book: namely, evidencing how the reasons of those going marching in the streets overlap with political and economic aspects. The recent wave of protests in the region finds a sort of opening moment in the demonstrations that have involved workers in the city of Tuzla in February 2014: from there, other street protests sparkled in the country and elsewhere in the Western Balkans, to the point that media have started using the expression “Balkan Spring”. Not surprisingly – considering what I have discussed – the social agitation emerged more vividly among Muslim Croats in the Federation, “the part of the post-war state most burdened by the enormous administrative apparatus and overlapping levels of government” (Kurtović, 2015, 639). In the Federation as elsewhere, privatization has not just failed to ensure prosperity, but it has even led to the collapse of former state firms leaving many workers without employment (Calori, 2021, 174). As I have had the chance to discuss, for the combined effect of the patronage systems and the deindustrialization process that has characterized the post-war context, wealth has been distributed unequally with some territories perceiving themselves to have benefitted less. For the very effect of the war first and the Dayton system after, the notion of territory has however become also synonymous with the constellation of specific ethnic enclaves. While many thought that privatization would have led to a decline of the importance of ethnicity, political elites have instead retained this category in strategic alliance with issues of security and protection against other groups, strengthening a network of clientelist alliances. The distortion is captured by Kurtović (2015, 645): “employment in the public sector, especially in the state bureaucracy, is virtually impossible to secure without party affiliation. State-owned firms have long used familial ties as a means of recruiting new employees, prompting a variety of social commentary and even jokes about the benefits of these concentrated kinship ties (…) authorities routinely use threats of job loss and actual firing to quiet both criticism and dissent”. The inequality brought by this system of privileges, open to the few, is exactly the reason why many went marching in the streets. In Bosnia and Herzegovina just as elsewhere, the impression is that protesters reject the political system in toto, expressing total dissatisfaction with the state of things. Protesters seek to address the mechanisms of ethnification of the society, which work increasingly as a covering for resource appropriation and state capture: “we are hungry in three languages” reads a sign exhibited during the 2014 protests in Bosnia showing that inequality is a trans-ethnic issue (it refers to the country’s three official languages, i.e., Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian). In other words, socio-economic issues manage to unite the citizens more than group belonging is capable to divide them. One of the protesters interviewed by Lai (2020, 178) stated that “the plena [the

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name of the self-proclaimed civic assemblies] demands had nothing to do with ethnicity. It had all to do with the position of an ordinary citizen in this system”. In Serbia, throughout the period 2018–2020, demonstrators enraged against the functioning of state institutions, the lack of freedom of the press, and the overall quality of the country’s democracy (Bjeloš, 2017). In the last year, the protest targeted also the measures adopted to contain the spread of Covid-19 in the country, yet always in connection with alleged influences that the ruling party had exerted on the Covid Crisis team and on the imprisonment of protestors. Corruption, autocracy, and fraud in the parliamentary elections were the primary motives of the protest that erupted in Albania in early 2017 and led by government opposition protesters. Often, political elites have responded with an unscrupulous use of ethnicity, which work against the interest of the citizens. All citizens. The people joining street protests across the region have de facto challenged the “hegemony of the ethno-­ nationalist elites” and “insisted on commonality and joint demands for justice for all” (Arsenijević, 2014, 45–46). The protests have turned into social loci with potential to cut across traditional divides and to mobilize people around civic concern and material needs. Civic solidarity displays commitment towards the future wellbeing of the region and a great potential for proposing a different organization of reality. And yet, the initiatives of civil society organizations have become politicized by rival movements or ruling parties, and associated with a specific interest, or group or again ethnicity in a move to discredit them. In such way, political forces manage to either “preempt”, reshape political claims before they can develop, or attempt at integrating the grassroots movements and their claims in the very same processes through which the elites tries to maintain and recreate ethnic divides (Hasić & Karabegović, 2018; Wimmen, 2019, 23). By doing so, chances to overcome ethnic categories are limited. Let’s see this in further examples. In Skopje, crowds gathered in 2015; after that, the opposition released leaked recordings revealing that ministers were plotting vote-rigging and the cover-up of the murder of a young man by a police officer in 2011. As turmoil quickly spread, the headquarters of the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), the largest ethnic Albanian party in North Macedonia, was attacked by unknown with a hand grenade. In the aftermath of the attack, an armed group of at least 50 members of local Albanian communities engaged in shooting with the police, and several deaths were counted on both sides. In February 2017, supporters of the VMRO DPMNE party took to the street of Skopje to protest against the formation of a new coalition government that, in their view, was an attack on national unity as Zaev has stroke a series of political deal with ethnic Albanian parties. Two months later, 200 demonstrators entered Macedonia’s parliament attacking MPs in protest for the election of new parliament speaker Talat Xhaferi, of Albanian descendent. Another example of protests against poor governance and clientelist systems becoming intertwined with ethnic tensions comes from Montenegro: in 2015, anti-­ government protests asked for the resignation of Đukanović due to allegation of his involvement in electoral and political corruption, a plot that was repeated in a similar fashion in 2020, in the city of Budva. In both cases, the police acted with

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brutality on protesters. Đukanović, who in 2015 was moreover nominated “Man of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption” by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), has regularly resorted to ethnically and political divisive campaign on religious and national identity. Grandiose architectural projects and the building of new shopping malls turned into fields of social contestation as well, primarily because they symbolize the gap between those who gain from being part of clientelist circles and those who are excluded. Very often, concerns for the environment and for the transparency of public-­private partnerships contributed to civil society initiatives. These dynamics closely resemble those seen in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, in Istanbul, where people occupy the park to resist the expropriation of public soil and its architectural transformation into a privatized space (Pedersen & Zoppi, 2017). “Project Skopje 2014” and the Belgrade Waterfront (Beograd na Vodi) were contested for their cost as well as for their revision of (local) history. As with Taksim Square, these projects included a re-organization of public and private spaces, even evicting residents to make room for luxury apartments and shops. The (unsuccessful) protests against the destruction of Picin Park in Banja Luka in 2013 and of the national theatre in Tirana in May 2020 are two other key examples. In the case of Tirana’s Teatri Kombëtar especially, we see how the public, social, and historical space is eroding in front of the advance of new projects boosted by the government, which do not enjoy large support, aiming at erecting shopping malls and other private buildings.

Conclusion In the light of the processes of unequal territorial distribution of wealth, of incipient urbanization, and of perpetuation of the ethno-nationalism of survival, it is difficult to imagine how social tensions could calm down in the near future in the absence of innovative political thinking as well as policymaking. The core problems remain in fact the absence of far-reaching reforms and weak, corrupted institutions. Above all, the general problem in the Western Balkans seems to revert around the question of ensuring that “the state seeks to define and then protect the common good” (Brentin & Bieber, 2019, 5). That is, overcoming the state’s failure to deliver services that respond to citizens’ needs prior that to the interests of predatory elites. It should be recalled that at present, most of the dynamics summarized in this section find an external origin or at least catalyst: the force of globalization; the pressure for (neoliberal) reforms and privatization exerted by the EU and other actors; and even the reification of ethnic categories prompted by politicians and reproduced also by international organizations active in the area. They all contribute, to different extents, to the growing demand for social justice in the Western Balkans, which is rooted in the transformation of the economy and in the mismanagement of the complex regional past and continues being a pressing question due to contemporary political practices. The Bosnian case was particularly instructive to

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appreciate the effects of the transition to a privatized economy managed more or less by the same elites that were in power during the wars. But evidence of similar dynamics comes also from the other regional countries. Against this backdrop, quite more impactful for the future of the Western Balkans could be the realization of a regional alliance between civil society organizations to fight common issues, corruption, and the ethno-politics played by the elites in primis. These are widespread and shared problems around which cohesion is possible.

Conclusions

The last decade has been rich with developments and events for the six Western Balkan countries. They have overcome the backlash of the global recession; they have earned a prospective date (2025) for potential EU accession, while Croatia officially became an EU member in 2013; they are now coping with the economic downturn and health emergency induced by the global pandemic. In all these aspects, and in the many others I have touched upon in the book, new cooperation initiatives and past-rooted animosities have co-existed all along. The fact that the WB6 are so intertwined in a dense web of historical contentions and still tensed intra- and inter-state relations reveals the extent to which these countries are connected and could transform present tensions in cooperation for joint development. On this basis, the book has attempted at describing the future of the Western Balkans exactly in terms of common dynamics, challenges, and opportunities. While we are somehow used to hear discourses about the differences and the diversity existing in the region, the analysis of selected matters within the political, economic, and social realms conducted here has suggested that WB6 countries present also many similarities in their societal dynamics and trends, especially if observed in connection with what is happening in the neighboring EU space. As explained in the introduction, this birdwatch approach rather than a meticulous look at each WB6 country’s context was considered by the author most appropriate to distillate the core of the issues that are vital in shaping the future political scenarios in the region. The book has underlined that many of the contemporary dynamics can be framed within an “intragmentation” dimension that considers at once pushes for cooperation among actors and counter-thrusts towards political fragmentation and vice versa. In the light of the examples provided, intragmentation appears eventually as an unavoidable process through which political, economic, and social goals can be achieved in the region. The challenge brought by nationalism and ethno-politics remains remarkable across the region, and considering their desegregating potential, they are determinant to understand intragmentation dynamics. Though with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Zoppi, Futures of the Western Balkans, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89628-7

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different degrees, all six countries appear still vulnerable to the appeal of sectarian politics that oppose one group to another, even more since this can be merged with other issues causing large discontent, such as unemployment, economic stagnation, and influx of asylum seekers through the Balkan route. Therefore, besides addressing the complex landscape of war legacies, ethnic hatred, and justice per se, I have tried to deal also with other underlying factors that prevent political reconciliation from happening today, 30 years after the breakup of Yugoslavia. To do so, I have enlarged the theme of political matters to embrace also economic factors (deindustrialization, poverty) and social factors (emigration, inequality, corruption). This is in fact where we find fertile ground for societal malaise and for what I have termed ethno-nationalism of survival. This approach was motivated by the realization that for ordinary citizens, uncertainty and instability in the region come from the future, rather than from the past and its multifarious legacy. And yet, the latter are continuously emphasized by political elites in order to legitimate and stabilize their grip on state institutions, while social and economic marginalization remain largely unaddressed. Left with little choice, hundred thousand WB6 citizens are emigrating to capital and large cities in the region or abroad in the EU and OECD countries. This contributes at once to fragmenting the territories from which they depart and to foster a sort of bottom-up integration as the emigrated citizens accumulate a wealth of expertise and cultural and language skills that may be used back in the homeland or to connect it with the new country of residence. But as their emigration is connected at least partly with the domestic and regional political dynamics, it necessarily represents a common failure of WB6 political elites. The latter consideration emerges also from the many street protests that have animated the Western Balkans in the last decade against ruling elites. The six countries remain ultimately the makers of their own destiny, for what concerns both internal and external relations. As for the latter, the Western Balkans are still dear to Brussels, despite the troubled waters it finds itself into, and have been increasingly recognized as strategic partners for security. Despite the shortcomings and the delays that observers are used to, the accession process will go on, and the WB6 are slowly converging towards the EU – but its timing ultimately rests on the pace of the democratization and reconciliation processes. If Brexit has clarified that EU membership is not forever, it has evidenced altogether that EU accession and membership are neither to be taken for granted, especially if new members could further weaken cohesion. Therefore, my conclusion is that besides prospective EU membership – which appears to be still the most desirable goal – the region per se substantially lacks a common future project, with attached goals for which possibly striving together for the common good. Administrative reforms, missing social justice, impunity for political elites, and the abandonment of rural areas: these questions, so diverse but connected, all require public awareness and actions in the political present, because the lack of social cohesion, of reconciliation, and of ethnic tensions are likely to be reproduced as long as the mechanisms of resource and wealth distribution will not become fairer and not constrained by ethnic affiliation. As reconciliation means

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especially the re-constitution of a community on new values, a fundamental step in this process is providing the region with new ideas and evidence about the prospect of a common development. This book has hopefully provided at least some of them, and more research is certainly needed. While the Western Balkan societies have achieved much in the last decades, the challenges mentioned above require major efforts and political commitment, as they represent the key passage to unlock the economic potential of the region and to improve the wellbeing of its population.

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