Valery Perry
In a new age of great-power politics, the Western Balkans might seem like an afterthought. But given the region’s centrality to three larger geopolitical trends, it could well play an outsize role in Europe over the next four years.
SARAJEVO – Although the full details of Donald Trump’s foreign-policy agenda remain to be seen, we do know where his second administration’s priorities lie. During his campaign, Trump indicated that there would be additional efforts to contain Iran, some kind of deal-making in the Middle East, negotiations over Ukraine’s future that are focused more on Moscow than Kyiv, selective assertiveness toward China, and open displays of disdain for Europe. Against this backdrop of global power politics, it might seem odd to call attention to the Western Balkans. Yet this small region could play an outsize role in Europe over the next four years and beyond.
The European Union’s grand vision of a continent “whole, free, and at peace” may seem quaint in the face of broader challenges such as the war in Ukraine and the rise of nationalistic and illiberal right-wing populist forces within its own borders. Moreover, its enlargement to incorporate the “Western Balkans 6” (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) has stalled. Not only have these countries failed to demonstrate – let alone achieve – meaningful progress toward EU accession; they have regressed along multiple indices of democratic governance.
Western Balkan governments have made few of the legislative or institutional reforms necessary for accession, and public support for joining the EU has declined. This trend has been most notable in Serbia, the largest of the six and the lens through which many EU leaders and European governments view the region. The certainty that once undergirded the transatlantic rules-based liberal democratic project seems to be withering before the assertive self-confidence of illiberal or outright autocratic and kleptocratic regimes. With its own lurch toward a more brazen kleptocracy, the Western Balkans are both a reflection and a bellwether of larger trends. In this context, three interconnected phenomena warrant closer attention: critical raw materials (CRMs) extraction, neo-imperialism, and migration.
Recent prospecting has identified reserves of the critical metals and minerals – including lithium, nickel, silver, and magnesium – needed for the transition to clean energy and other technologies. While the impact of a CRM extraction boom will be felt most directly in Bosnia and Serbia, there will be cross-border spillovers, which could play a very positive or a very negative role in the region’s social, political, and economic development.
One can imagine an optimistic scenario in which these natural resources are responsibly extracted and used to revitalize a once-proud engineering sector. If so, raw materials hauled out of the earth could enable the Western Balkan economy to climb the global value chain. Political leaders, working with local communities and EU businesses and specialists, could bring back good jobs, invest more in education and innovation, and finally emerge from a 30-year slump.
Unfortunately, this is not the most likely scenario, given the region’s pervasive institutional culture of political and economic corruption. Already, the prospect of a CRM boom is attracting local and European companies that often show little concern about good governance and other liberal values.
One might think that the EU would see this as an opportunity to strengthen the institutional and legislative mechanisms needed to prepare these countries for membership. Instead, European leaders have shown that they are fully prepared to do business with the same illiberal and autocratic political class that has stymied reform for a generation. Last summer, for example, then-German Chancellor Olaf Scholz traveled to Serbia to announce a new lithium “mega project” over the objections of Serbians who describe it as environmentally hazardous and insufficiently beneficial to their own communities.
Under Pressure
That brings us to the second phenomenon: neo-imperialism and the scramble for spheres of influence. European governments and companies justify their role in Western Balkan CRM exploitation by arguing that “if we don’t do it, Russia or China will.” This rationale is all too convenient. While they claim that the region will become a fully integrated part of the EU someday, they give carte blanche to business, environmental, and governance practices that would never be accepted in the bloc.
This form of engagement will come at a cost. By disconnecting economics and business from concerns about human rights, transparency, and democracy, EU leaders are chipping away at what made the European experiment unique in the first place. The principle that liberal governance is a necessary component of comprehensive security is being jettisoned.
Ironically, but not surprisingly, this approach is feeding the larger geopolitical trends that many European leaders say they want to counter. Stripping away the values that undergird the EU enables a return to short-term, transactional realpolitik, further opening the door for illiberal powers like Russia and China to make their own values-free business deals with local Balkan elites.
While China has long sought to use the region as a node in its Belt and Road Initiative, Russia’s interests are more cultural and political. The Kremlin hopes to reinforce its imperial project of creating a Russkiy mir (Russian world) by promoting the regional equivalent, Srpski svet (Serbian world), in Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro (a NATO member). Central to this strategy are efforts to erode faith in democratic governance, which is presented as neither possible nor even desirable.
The third issue that will feature prominently in the Western Balkans and the rest of Europe is migration, which can be separated into two variants. First, there is migration from Pakistan and the rest of the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa toward countries such as Germany and Sweden. While capsized boats in the Mediterranean tend to attract the most news coverage, the land routes through the Western Balkans account for a large share of migratory flows. That is why a key pillar of the EU’s immigration policy involves Turkey and the Western Balkans. Europe has done deals with illiberal regional leaders to impel them to harden their borders, and has empowered EU countries like Croatia to push migrants back into Bosnia or Serbia, which serve as a convenient geographic holding pen.
The other variant is the migration of Western Balkan workers into the EU, where they are employed in health, transportation, hospitality, or other sectors, often with the full encouragement of European governments and private-sector recruiters. Over time, these flows result in more citizens from the region moving north and west, while migrants from farther east and south are brought to the Western Balkans either to backfill labor in construction, mining, tourism, and other industries, or as a temporary pit stop on the way to the EU. Owing to its position at the center of both migration flows, the region is conducting a massive social experiment that could test the social cohesion of small towns and cities unlike anything since the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
Given all these worrying dynamics, the outlook for the Western Balkans may seem grim. Those holding out hope that a Western-oriented, pro-European perspective will transform their societies for the better are waking up to the fact that their EU interlocutors may not actually live by the liberal values they espouse.
Nonetheless, the post-1990s “transitions” have at least inoculated the region’s people against the anti-democratic viruses of mis/disinformation, kleptocracy, inequality, and raw transactional politics that are now afflicting supposedly “consolidated” democracies. Student and citizen protests in Serbia show that people there have not given up on trying to change their future. Those in the West who are still committed to liberal values must reach out to likeminded allies wherever they can. That is the only way to restore democratic self-confidence, without which the global tide of illiberal opportunism will continue to rise.
*Valery Perry is a senior associate at the Democratization Policy Council and the editor of Extremism and Violent Extremism in Serbia: 21st-Century Manifestations of an Historical Challenge (Columbia University Press, 2019). She is writing for Project Syndicate as of 2025
