Chapter 13 - The European Union and the Balkans: In the same boat

Corina Stratulat, Marko Kmezić, and Srdjan Majstorović argue in ‘The European Union and the Balkans: In the same boat’ that while for three decades the EU has been preoccupied with how to transform its vicinity, the main concern today is how the West itself is being transformed by modern-day challenges: globalisation, aging societies, migration, and so on. These seem to throw the Union’s political, economic, and social model ever more into question. The way forward, however, is not to quarantine the ‘patient’ behind hard borders. Instead of retreating into navel-gazing, the authors call for the EU to strengthen and diversify the ways in which it reaches out to its allies in the Balkans, who, in any case, share the same problems and interests.