Garčević Discusses “The Battle for the Balkans” at Euractiv Conference
On July 13, 2021, Ambassador Vesko Garčević, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, participated in the virtual “Balkan Geopolitics” conference hosted by Euractiv.
Guest speakers included George Friedman, founder of Stratfor.com and GeopoliticalFutures.com, and Solomon Passy, Former Chairman of the United Nations Security Council, Former Bulgarian Foreign Minister. Garčević was a panelist along with Mira Milosevich, Senior Analyst for Russia and Eurasia at the Elcano Royal Institute for International and Strategic Studies and Associate Professor at the IE University School of Global and Public Affairs, and Nemanja Todorović Štiplija, Editor-in-Chief of European Western Balkans.
The underlying argument by all the participants was that the European Union enlargement process has been severely compromised in the last several years and is nearing a dead end. Some panelists were even more critical saying that the EU has lost “the battle for the Balkan.”
Garčević argued that “the EU currently has no efficient answer to the cooperative transactional models promoted by China and Russia in the Western Balkans.” It is easy to blame the countries from the region for democratic backsliding, but both sides – the EU and Western Balkans – have taken responsibility for the success of the project. As accession is getting more demanding and taking longer, he stated that countries in the region are made to feel like “hamsters on a wheel.” Therefore, they’ve become a low hanging fruit for Beijing and Moscow that promote development and governance models which are in stark contrast with the EU’s concept of reforms.
Details of the event can be read on Euractiv’s website.
During his diplomatic career, Ambassador Vesko Garčević dealt with issues pertinent to European security and NATO for almost 14 years. In 2004, he was posted in Vienna to serve as Ambassador to Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He had been a Montenegro’s Ambassador to NATO from 2010 until 2014 and served as a Montenegro’s National Coordinator for NATO from 2015 until he joined the faculty at the Pardee School. Learn more about Ambassador Garčević on his faculty profile.