Road to Europe: Between the Berlin Process and the Open Balkan Initiative

Abstract

The Open Balkan initiative has been partially supported by the leadership of the Western Balkans. If years ago it seemed a political whim, currently it constitutes a highly conditional factor from a two-level perspective: firstly, in the bilateral relations between the Balkan countries and, secondly, in relation to the Euro-Atlantic orientation of these countries for which the EU foreign policy had implemented the Berlin Process since 2014. In fact, the two processes have key differences, since for the Open Balkan initiative the priority interest resides in economic cooperation, while the Berlin process seeks to resolve, before their accession to the EU, many divergences of the Western Balkan countries, issues of a more complex nature than that of economic and cross-border cooperation. The Balkans are a region of turmoil where two world wars started, which left us with indelible memories of human suffering. The initiative has remained a Balkans’ troika due to its lack of support at the national level and beyond. The analysis based on a mixed-methods’ approach, seeks to highlight which of these two processes, that of the Balkans leadership or that of the European politics, is the most suitable for a comprehensive integration, without inter-ethnic conflicts and the mutual influence of the economic expansion.

Keywords

• eu integration policy
• ethnic conflicts
• open balkan initiative
• berlin process
• economic development