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Western Balkans: Options for the Interplay of Neighbourly Relations and EU Accession up to 2025
Under the European Commission’s 2018 Western Balkan strategy, candidate countries from the region must resolve bilateral disputes before joining the EU. As it wants to avoid importing conflicts, the EU puts the onus to ensure good neighbourly relations onto the region itself.
{image1}BCSP Researcher Bojan Elek participated in development of scenarios for Western Balkans with other international researchers from this year’s TRAIN programme. Scenarios range from increasing regional cooperation to the possible fallout from failed conflict resolution or an EU fatigue toward the region.
Throughout the year 2018, a group of twelve TRAIN alumni and three experts from EU member states engaged in an in-depth strategic foresight project dedicated to the future of the Western Balkans’ EU integration with a focus on regional cooperation. In three workshops, the analysts developed scenarios from which to draw ideas and recommendations for EU enlargement policy. The process was facilitated methodologically by Foresight Intelligence.
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The 2018 TRAIN programme cycle started with a kick-off seminar in Berlin from 15 to 19 April 2018. Apart from a consolidation of technical skills and methodology a special focus lay on the interaction among the participants, as well as on discussions with political decision-makers and think tank representatives. The participants further elaborated their findings of these three days during two ensuing workshops in Belgrade and in Brussels. They discussed their results with relevant EU decision-makers and finally summarized them in a joint publication.
Particular emphasis was placed on current developments such as the publication of the EU Enlargement Strategy and the regional country reports of the European Commission, resulting in targeted recommendations for action.
With the aim of fostering policy dialogue between think tanks and political actors in the Western Balkans, the TRAIN programme (Think Tanks Providing Research and Advice through Interaction and Networking) offers organizations from the six Western Balkans states – Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia training and networking opportunities. The programme is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office (Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe).
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