Written by: Emina Husejinović

 Now three decades after the conflicts in the 90s, countries are still very much lost in procedures, integrations, reforms, and legislatures and without many great results. Tensions are everywhere with political leaders spurring up the tensions with usual national and ethnic divisions amongst people. It seems the only verified recipe for political triumph is to create even more divided societies with no clear perspective and will to prosper.

In the 2000s the idea was to develop close consultation through intensified dialogue leading to a unified approach to security and stability in the Western Balkans. Their ‘joint strategic approach’ identifies a common vision for the region based on self-sustaining stability, democratic and effective government, a useful free market economy, and closer integration with the Euro-Atlantic structures. The agreement implicitly recognizes a certain division of labor in the field of security-relevant reform, with the EU taking the lead in police reform and governance issues and NATO in military and defense reform.

 Major problems remain with criminal networks which use these states as transit corridors for smuggling of humans, drugs, and other contraband. Frequent scandals suggest the widespread collusion of state and political authorities, including police, border guards, and customs officials, in organized crime. In addition to weaknesses in national laws, enforcement, and institutional infrastructure, the countries of the Western Balkans region are also limited in their cooperation with each other by a lack of structures and networks for joint action of a transnational nature, for example, through cooperative border management and police and judicial cooperation. The region has failed to develop common policies regarding visas, access rights, re-admission, and asylum, leaving loopholes that can be exploited by criminal groups.

This “mess” is not helpful in an already somewhat unenthusiastic climate where citizens constantly feel overlooked, neglected, and uninspired and each day more and more people decide to leave the Balkans and find their fortunes elsewhere (elsewhere being more prosperous countries, or to be more specific, Norway, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Belgium, and the list goes on and on).

Putting in context the countries of the Western Balkans excluding Croatia (now an EU member state), the rest of them struggle to embrace necessary reforms, especially in governance and stability adopting various strategies, and recommendations within the areas of military defense, judicial systems, police and educational reforms, etc.

 Therefore, the international community’s role is inconclusive not only because it is inclined or obliged to push reforms not fully understood by the local populations, but also because it is motivated in large part by its own security concerns regarding a region so close to Europe. Security sector reform in the Western Balkans, then, is not so much the consensual product of a rational process of self-evaluation by national political elites as it is an instrument to serve the interests of external actors and agendas.