Scholz: The integration of the Western Balkans one of the greatest tasks for the EU

13 comments
  1. You’ll never integrate them. You can’t even handle Orban and those guys are even worse.

    > Western Balkans are of strategic importance to Germany

    This explains a lot. They want more underdeveloped markets to be taken over by Germany.

  2. How many times has this been said? The EU doesn’t want to expand. I don’t blame them either because truthfully, Rama and co have done nothing to further EU accession process. They lack a desire to demote themselves from the God Emperor Drug Lord status they have in Albania, while the servile Albanian population will not challenge that either regardless of how much we support the EU. That kind of mentality is a consequence of generations of authoritarian rule [cough communism] and it takes an equal amount of generations to wipe out, not magically through immediate EU accession. Only then will we actually be able to tackle our problems.

  3. First integrate 2004 accesion to the liberalism then we can see. Growing eastwards is just adding more illiberal,racist citizens into EU. Not everything is about money. It is clear Ex-Commies are having strugless with modern values and multiculturalism. They already broke the image of Democratic, Craddle of Human rights of Europe. I can not imagine what getting deep into Balkans will do.

  4. It is but the EU doesn’t seem to work hard enough on this front. Albania is a crime-infested mess, there are still talks of Bosnia breaking up, Kosovo and Serbia don’t seem to make any progress, and on the contraty Serbia seems to be moving away from EU even faster.

  5. >one of the greatest tasks for the EU

    that will never be acheived as long as member states can single handedly veto and blackmail new members to satisfy their nationalist narratives. Bulgaria and Greece (and Hungary) already signaled such blackmailing and each new member will probably do such stuff for the newer members.

    EU must first tame member states’ nationalist desires before moving on with the enlargement.

  6. I may be biased, being from the Western Balkans myself, but the EU should do it just because the EU map would look much nicer after the fact.

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