Bregu: The European Union will always be unfinished business without the Western Balkans

The Secretary General of the Council for Regional Cooperation (RCC) Majlinda Bregu said at the Bled Strategic Forum that the European Union will always be unfinished business without the Western Balkans and indicated that stagnation and further delaying the decision on opening accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia is a risk.

"Non-opening would bring instability, immigration, non-constructive influence of other geopolitical actors. Every positive moment can easily be lost if, in the perspective of membership, the resolution of the problems that have arisen continues to be postponed," said Bregu last night at the panel on the Western Balkans - Europeanization, democratization, shared responsibility, reports RCC in a statement.

She said that no one can afford the luxury of continuing to waste time, and pointed out that people are leaving the region, that a third of the region's population has left in the past five years.

"These are the real problems of the region. It is up to us to change it and transform our societies. The EU should recognize this warning sign as an opportunity, because maintaining a narrative about the perspective of membership is not an easy task," she added.

In order to speed up the cooperation, the governments in the region have committed to implement the Regional Economic Area (REA), Bregu said, adding that she hoped they would be successful in this.

"We have succeeded in the area of ​​digitization, with the Regional Agreement on Roaming, which is a sign that things can move forward when there is political will. On the other hand, when we talk about mobility and the agreement on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications between economies in the region - even if approved, what would be its meaning if Kosovars cannot travel to Bosnia and Herzegovina without a visa, and during the last year the number of rejected visa requests exceeded the number of visas issued," said Bregu.

She added that the REA may represent a nice but limited framework that needs to be strengthened with a political element.

"Regional cooperation is not a technical, but a political process, which is based on the political will of governments, but also of citizens who support the process of regional cooperation, more than governments - 74% of citizens want to see it in our region, according to the data of the Balkan Barometer for 2019. and they think that it will improve their lives much faster than EU membership," said Bregu.

She reminded that in the region the support for membership in the European Union is 56 percent, and that people believe that it will work better with their neighbors, and that in order to achieve this, everyone should share the same vision.

The panel on the Western Balkans was also attended by Peka Havisto, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Finland and the introducer, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs from BiH Igor Crnadak, Sbije Ivica Dačić, Srđan Darmanović of Montenegro, Nikola Dimitrov of North Macedonia, Bedžet Pacoli of Kosovo, as well as Matthew Palmer, Deputy Assistant of the US Secretary of State, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary, Peter Szijarto. The moderator was Goran Svilanović, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia and former Secretary General of the RCC.

The panelists talked about various issues about the relationship between the EU and the Western Balkans, the readiness of the region to implement the necessary reforms, but also the readiness of the EU to help renew the promise of a better tomorrow for the region, according to the RCC.