A European Union summit held in a charming coastal city in Greece more than two decades ago would have largely been forgotten by now had it not been for a seemingly credible promise of a better future for the Balkans. At the Thessaloniki summit of 2003, the EU expressed support for “the European perspective of the Western Balkan countries,” which has since been taken by Brussels and regional actors as marking a new chapter in the bloc’s approach to the Balkans.
The summit offered the post-Yugoslav states an assumed road map to EU membership. In a highly bureaucratized undertaking, states were to undergo a lengthy process of aligning national legislation with the EU on a host of issues—from human rights to economic reforms to intellectual property. Successive reforms were to be rewarded with visa-free travel; candidate status for EU membership; accession talks; and, eventually, full membership.
Yet 22 years later, one such state, Bosnia and Herzegovina, has failed to implement these reforms, and accession talks are nowhere in sight. Bosnia’s EU bid risks becoming counter productive. Courting the EU has allowed Bosnian politicians to evade responsibility for improving the everyday lives of citizens. Worse, they have framed every bureaucratic step as a major leap toward EU membership, even as some of these steps have eroded Bosnian democracy.
At this point, taking a break from Bosnia’s unrealistic EU bid could be the best way to force the country’s leaders and their constituents to take responsibility for their country’s democratic future.
Following the Bosnian War, the prospect of a path to greater stability through EU integration offered hope. The country was undergoing several simultaneous transitions—from war to peace, from socialist authoritarianism to multiparty democracy, and from command to market economy.
As postwar rebuilding took its course, the deficiencies of the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in 1995 began to sink in. The accords instituted a Byzantine political system characterized by ethnic representation and vetoes at several levels of governance. In essence, any decision made at the state-level is subject to vetoes and trade-offs to ensure that lowest-common-denominator decisions are adopted.
A major trade-off at Dayton was that Bosnian Serb separatists were given a regional political entity—Republika Srpska—and veto powers at the state-level in exchange for remaining in Bosnia. The country’s territorial integrity was maintained and affirmed, but separatists assumed major levers of power. The policies of separatism continued through other means—hollowing out the state-level institutions while building up Republika Srpska at the expense of the state.
EU membership was widely seen as the panacea for Dayton’s shortfalls. The idea after the Thessaloniki summit was that Bosnia would adopt reforms in line with the EU acquis, enhancing state-building and fulfilling criteria for eventual membership. EU pressure was intended to serve as a catalyst for domestic politicians to undertake difficult decisions in Bosnia and institute reforms, with the country’s eventual membership in the EU as the prize. With little consensus in Bosnia on domestic and foreign policy after the war, joining the EU seemed to be a rare issue that could be agreed upon.
As NATO provided much-needed security in postwar Bosnia, EU membership seemed the obvious next step toward a more prosperous, European-aligned future. Bosnia’s European integration process offered a plethora of benefits, including access to EU funds; the ability for Bosnians to work, study, and travel more easily in the EU; and, perhaps most importantly, the notion of increasing Bosnia’s security. For a small, postwar country, EU alignment seemed to promise economic benefits with little costs.
However, the membership road map’s vagueness misled Bosnian officials and the public into thinking that full membership benefits were closer than they actually were. Now, 22 years after the Thessaloniki summit, Bosnia is still waiting for the EU to set a date to officially start accession talks, even though talks with Ukraine and Moldova began in June 2024. (Both countries were far behind Bosnia in the integration process.)
The drawn-out timeline for accession and inconsistencies from Brussels remain major sources of concern, and the optimism of the mid- to late-2000s is now long gone. At this point, there are neither serious reforms in Bosnia nor a clear road map for joining the EU.
In fact, both Bosnian officials and EU diplomats play along with the polite fiction that membership is still in the cards. Stating otherwise publicly would diminish the EU officials’ remaining leverage over Bosnia. While Bosnia is a small country for the bloc, the successor states to Yugoslavia were once referred to as Europe’s “black hole,” and the Balkans were seen as the powder keg of Europe. Hence, the accession of this region to the EU was also viewed as a means of finalizing the process of EU expansion and extending the zone of peace and prosperity to the volatile Balkans.
Now, the absence of a road map to membership means that serious reforms will be less likely. Bosnia’s vast bureaucracy serves as a clientelist network for politicians and ensures that watered-down reforms are adopted most of the time. The vested interests of the political elite, bureaucratic inertia, and multiple levels of governance have forced the country into a limbo.
Worse, Bosnia’s commitment to pursing EU membership is now being weaponized to disrupt the stability that postwar Bosnia did manage to achieve. In a remarkable twist, ethnic separatists are using the mantra of EU acquis to adopt legislation that chips away at the state-building achieved in the post-Dayton period, which attempted to give different ethnic groups balanced political power.
The brunt of responsibility is with the current Sarajevo-based politicians who have justified their pursuit of power on EU grounds. Three Sarajevo-based political parties—the Social Democratic Party, Our Party, and People and Justice—replaced the influential, conservative Party of Democratic Action in the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina in early 2023. In doing so, they formed a coalition with Republika Srpska’s Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik and Bosnian Croat hard-line leader Dragan Covic. To justify empowering these ethnic separatists, these three parties insisted that the alliance with Covic and Dodik would enable them to pass legislation that would advance Bosnia’s EU bid.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, Covic and Dodik grew more powerful, advancing an agenda that has only taken Bosnia further from the European Union.
Until recently, the post of Bosnia’s minister of security was given to a Dodik ally and a highly controversial figure. The head of the state-level police agency is a Dodik ally. The Border Control Authority, until recently, was under Covic’s cadres. Police in Republika Srpska are under Dodik’s control. A highly influential member of Dodik’s party was also appointed as the chief of Bosna’s Indirect Taxation Authority, further entrenching the party’s influence. Handing over of key positions in finance and security to Dodik and Covic has allowed the separatists to appoint loyalists in the security and financial apparatus of the state.
Additionally, for years, Covic spearheaded the effort to entrench ethnic voting in Bosnia. Because Croatia has a veto over Bosnia’s EU accession, the nationalist Croatian government can use this threat to back Covic’s efforts. This means, paradoxically, that Bosnia’s EU accession process has given Croatia leverage that it could use to consolidate ethnic-based representation.
Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic Radman has repeatedly hinted at this, saying in May, for example, that “[i]t is essential that political actors in Bosnia and Herzegovina … recognize … Croatia’s efforts to ensure Bosnia and Herzegovina’s European path.” Now, Covic and Zagreb are using this power to insist on electoral reforms in Bosnia that will, in practice, guarantee that Covic’s Croatian Democratic Party retains a seat in the country’s three-person presidency and remains an irreplaceable party in future governments.
On August 6, Dodik was stripped of his presidency by Central Electoral Commission for his failure to comply with the rulings of the international envoy overseeing the Dayton Agreement. But his removal doesn’t change the conflict within Bosnia’s political system. Even now, Dodik has said that he intends to remain in office and appeal the ruling as long as he has the support of the Republika Srpska parliament.
Instead of waiting on the EU to resolve its problems, Bosnia should discard the hope that membership is near and focus on its own development with its own existing resources. While Bosnia’s economic cooperation and educational exchanges with the EU should continue, pausing the country’s membership bid would achieve at least two objectives.
First, it would tell the Bosnian public and voters an inconvenient truth. Bosnia’s full membership is unlikely in the foreseeable future, both because the current political system impedes serious reforms for membership and because the political dynamics within the EU have shifted against further enlargement.
Second, it would allow Bosnian decision-makers, opinion leaders, and citizens to focus their priorities on improving everyday standards of living rather than meeting EU-imposed reforms. The country could also weigh which EU-backed reforms are worthy and which are simply not in Bosnia’s long-term interests.
Furthermore, clearing the fog of unfounded expectation of the EU as a panacea would be essential to Bosnia’s progress. By reiterating the EU membership narrative, Bosnian politicians have, for years, outsourced responsibility for tackling existing challenges by diverting attention to Brussels. This would force Bosnia’s politicians to focus on bread-and-butter issues such as tackling the rising prices of food, housing, and utility bills.
For years, Bosnia’s key foreign objectives were membership in NATO and the EU. Joining NATO remains the country’s priority, and this is where the United States can bring Bosnia under its security umbrella and safeguard peace in the Balkans.
However, in Bosnia’s current state, and at this rate, EU membership bid is no longer worth it. Accepting that membership is essentially off the table for the foreseeable future and pausing the bid would put an end to the expectation that Brussels will resolve Bosnia’s challenges. More importantly, it would lead to a more open debate about how best to make use of the existing resources in the country.