Donald Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election in the United States makes it imperative for Europe to act decisively, and quickly, in the one region where it has real power — the Western Balkans.

The European Union has ten weeks –— until Trump’s inauguration — to get serious about its geopolitical role.

While the EU won’t be able to substitute for US power across Europe in the immediate term, it can do so in the Balkans.

This is necessary for Europe’s security outlook, but also as a first step in a broader recalibration of global political actors in the wake of this electoral outcome.

However, the Western Balkans is also the region where the EU’s more recent policy approach has resembled most that of Trump.

For too long, the EU and its member states have viewed the Balkans through the enlargement lens, reducing the process to bureaucratic box-ticking and abandoning its potential transformative power.

To the contrary, the EU has used the enlargement process as a cover for opportunistic deal-making — giving in to local leaders’ revival of ethno-territorial, divisive agendas, thus threatening not only the stability of the region, but also the Union’s own security interests.

Trump’s victory makes it imperative for the EU to recommit to assertive comprehensive security as the foundation of its engagement with the region.

As a starting point, this should include immediately bolstering EUFOR in Bosnia and Herzegovina and KFOR in Kosovo. Both countries are in the crosshairs of president Aleksandar Vučić’s irredentist ‘Serbian World’, a copy/paste of Putin’s ‘Russian World’ which are ideological policy frameworks completely antithetical to a values-based EU orientation. 

At the same time as recommitting to its security role in the Balkans, the EU also needs to overhaul its underlying policy, which has been allowed to drift for many years.

It needs to urgently shift from what has become a values-free enlargement process to an approach that is both based on the fundamental values enshrined in Article 2 of the Lisbon Treaty and uses the full panoply of European influence, including making use of the region’s economic dependency on the EU.

‘Enlargement theatre’

Enlargement theatre without values has undercut citizen support for the accession process, as citizens in the region dismiss it as hypocritical and self-serving to elites they distrust at home – and in Brussels.

The Western Balkans is the one region where the EU has had a leadership role for some two decades – but it has failed to fully seize it.

Instead, it has engaged in a make-believe enlargement process which has failed to incentivize and enact reform in the countries of the region, many of which have seen significant backsliding on democracy and the rule of law in recent years, led by Serbia.

Yet the EU’s policy — in lockstep with that of the Biden administration, marking a continuity with the Trump administration’s regional policy — has been to court Vučić, studiously ignore his increasingly autocratic control of the state and society, and reward this regression with increasingly economistic transactionalism that undermines the values dimension of accession as well as the region’s security.

The rationale is that this will ‘peel’ Belgrade away from Moscow’s orbit; however there has been no evidence of this over a decade.

Wishful thinking

Bosnia and Herzegovina received candidate status despite failing to meet the 14 conditions outlined by the European Commission in 2019.

Montenegro, with its most pro-Kremlin and pro-Serbian government since independence, is held up as a success story.

North Macedonia, which demonstrated citizen courage in demanding the reforms needed for a country with EU aspirations, has been repeatedly punished by EU states with their own narrow agendas.

And Kosovo, which is under direct threat from Belgrade, has been made to languish in no-man’s land under EU measures, punished for insisting on upholding the principles and values previously set by the West in the political dialogue.

Replacing the US security role in Europe is not feasible in the short term — but replacing US troops in KFOR is, and would take away a second Trump administration’s blackmailing power towards Prishtina for any potential revival of ethno-territorial division ideas.

Bolstering EUFOR’s overall deterrent capacity, including deploying EUFOR to Brčko, the connecting tissue between the two halves of Bosnia’s secessionist entity Republika Srpska, would put an end to the ambitions of local strongman Milorad Dodik, Putin’s main asset in southeastern Europe.

Both moves would curb Moscow’s influence in the region, whose main vectors are Vučić and Viktor Orbán. They would also demonstrate resolve in a region where political bullies only understand firm pushback, not a soft touch.

The European Commission keeps claiming a “geopolitical” role, pointing to an accession process that is “back on track” and “accelerating,” as DG NEAR’s Gert Jan Koopman told the European Parliament in September.

But enlargement policy has been fundamentally reimagined thanks to a transactional approach which frontloads economic aspects of integration at the expense of a values-based societal transformation.

At a time when liberal democracy is under direct threat in Washington and a resurgent, imperialist Russia is waging a war of extermination against Ukraine, the EU no longer has the luxury of bureaucratic inertia. It must take the initiative, defusing the standing security risks proactively with hard power, to enable actual broad progress in the Western Balkans.