Europe's Waiting Room Has a Door. In Tivat, the EU Should Open It.

WB30's COO, Reuben Johnston statement put out pre-EU Western Balkans Conference.

Twenty-three years ago, Brussels told the Western Balkans they belonged in the European family. They are still on the doorstep. When EU and regional leaders convene in Tivat on 5 June, the difficult truth is that the door has not moved an inch since Croatia slipped through it in 2013.

The Western Balkans are still queuing, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. All hold candidate status; none has an arrival date.

Montenegro now leads the pack, with Albania close behind. But "leading" is a relative term when the finish line keeps receding. Both countries, alongside the reminder of the WB6 still wrestle with the region's defining ailment, difficulties in implementing EU acquis, or the EU’s rulebook.

Brussels is not an innocent bystander here. For years its enlargement machinery has prized predictable governments over genuine democracy, handing out funds and technical help to copy the EU rulebook into law while the underlying politics stayed untouched. And open-ended wait for the WB6 is its own trap: leaders who suspect membership will never arrive on their watch have little reason to spend political capital earning it. Delay does not preserve the region; it quietly degrades it.

That decay now has an audience. Where Europe hesitates, others step in. WB30’s upcoming research shows the extent to which Russia and China are ready to pounce.

This is why enlargement is no longer a favour the EU might extend, it is a security interest it can no longer defer. Leaving any of the six outside does keeps a fault line running through the continent, and Europe's rivals know exactly how to widen it.

Plenty of clever workarounds are circulating; slotting Balkan agencies into EU systems short of membership, or Berlin's notion of "associated" states that join the talks but not the club. Each has merit as a step. Each also risks hardening into a permanent excuse, a way to look busy while the real decision goes unmade.

There is a braver option, and it should be spoken about in Tivat: admit all six together and set the date for 2030. Bringing them in as a group is a political choice that demands bravery. A common deadline would rescue a promise that has lost its credibility, give reformers something concrete to fight for, and strip outside powers of the wedge they use to drive into Europe.

WB30 does not call for a political move of generosity, the Western Balkans bring the EU a young workforce, an untapped market, critical raw materials and the strategic ground between its own members, the missing piece of Europe's map. The region is as much an opportunity for the Union as the Union is for the region. Folding it in does not dilute Europe; it completes it.