Bosnia joins the queue

News from Europe this week is that the European Union’s government (the Commission) has approved the opening of accession talks with Bosnia & Herzegovina. Assuming the step is signed off by a summit EU leaders next week, Bosnia & Herzegovina will become the fifth country in the western Balkans to have reached that stage on its path to EU membership.

The four ahead of it in the queue are Montenegro, which opened negotiations in 2012, Serbia (2014), North Macedonia and Albania (both 2022). Other candidates outside the region are Turkey, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine; the last two opened negotiations only three months ago, while negotiations with Georgia are yet to begin at all. Turkey, on the other hand, has supposedly been at the negotiation stage since 2005, but in practice its application has been frozen since 2016.

We’ve looked at the EU’s enlargement process before (for example here), with its constant foot-dragging both in Brussels itself and by the heads of government. Thirteen new members were admitted between 2004 and 2013, but none since then, and none that even seem close – Montenegro is probably the best prospect, but it’s thought to be still some years off.

This tardiness has been damaging the EU’s reputation in the region for years, but the problem has become more acute recently with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the return of security issues to centre stage. The Balkans have been at peace for almost 25 years, but in many places it is an uneasy peace; the grievances of the 1990s are still very much alive. Common membership of the EU, if it had been effected by now, could have done much to promote reconciliation.

So now, just when integrating the western Balkan countries into the European family becomes more urgent, the EU is too preoccupied to give it much attention. It was able to move quickly to give Ukraine candidate status, but nobody pretends that its membership is anything but a long-term project. The more mundane business of advancing accession talks remains on the back burner.

Sure enough, Serbia, traditionally the main Russian ally in the region, has cooled noticeably on EU membership, at the level of both officialdom and public opinion. If living at peace with its neighbors is not seen to have brought any benefits, it may be tempted to try a different strategy – aided by the EU’s stubborn refusal to contemplate revision of the border with Kosovo. And just as it was in the 1990s, Bosnia is the place at which the region’s various tensions intersect.

Bosnia is not a nation-state like its neighbors, but rather a loose federation of two states, one Serb and one combined Bosniak-Croat. The Serb part, known as Republika Srpska, mostly elects Serb nationalists who make no secret of their ambition to join Serbia, while many Croats would happily hive off the majority-Croatian areas to Croatia. Keeping the country together may or may not be preferable to disassembling it in an orderly fashion, but either would be a lot easier if the neighboring states were already in the EU.