The future of Western Balkans regional cooperation

Three decades of regional cooperation building in the Western Balkans have produced more than 30 active frameworks, yet implementation consistently lags behind formal commitments.

This policy brief argues that the region no longer moves as a bloc: a pattern of reform-willing “national champions” has emerged alongside countries with far less appetite for change.

EU accession operates bilaterally, country by country, cluster by cluster, while regional cooperation operates collectively, with commitments made jointly but implementation left to national prerogatives and no equivalent enforcement mechanism. Where the two logics conflict, bilateral progress prevails, and intra-regional disputes, such as Kosovo’s exclusion from full membership in several regional bodies, further erode the assumption of a coherent six-country unit.

The policy brief’s central argument is that gradual integration, rather than additional frameworks, should be the organising principle of regional cooperation. The proposed model is a two-track architecture: a baseline track open to all six, covering genuinely shared regional public goods (energy interconnection, environmental protection, cross-border mobility, disaster management); and a differentiated track, offering accelerated EU access calibrated strictly to acquis alignment and reform performance, not to participation in regional structures.