PRAGUE — The European Union offered a path to membership to western Balkan nations, calling on a region divided by poverty and ethnic tensions to improve the rule of law, curb corruption and put aside past grudges to enter the world’s largest trading club.
With the U.K. set to become the first EU member to depart, Serbia and Montenegro can join by 2025, the European Commission said Tuesday after approving an Enlargement Strategy in the Western Balkans. Officials said the region’s other four countries — Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Macedonia and Kosovo — have a clear perspective toward entering the bloc at that time as well, depending on the pace of reforms and negotiations, more than two decades after the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
The strategy is a shift by the EU after a decade of financial crises, the largest refugee inflows since World War II, Brexit and Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. An alleged coup attempt in Montenegro, unrest in the parliaments of Macedonia and Albania, and tensions between Serbia and Kosovo underscore the risks of renewed unrest. Officials in Brussels focused on resolving security issues and strengthening the rule of law in the region of 18 million people.
“From a European perspective, it’s important to understand that we either export stability or we import instability,” EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn told reporters in Strasbourg, France. “The EU, its member states, will never accept a state that hasn’t resolved pending issues or conflicts.”
