In 2003, an exuberant European Union met with the countries of the Western Balkans (Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania) in Thessaloniki, Greece and promised all of them accession. Some established EU members, like Austria, sponsored this collective vision.

Slovenia joined a year later and Croatia became an EU member in 2013. Both are former Yugoslav republics. This rankled: the 5 remaining rumps of Yugoslavia felt unjustly excluded. Twenty years later, they still are – and do.

Equally impoverished and badly governed countries – Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta, to mention but a few – joined over the years. Arguably, the strategic importance of the Western Balkans exceeds that of Romania. So, why the delay?

In the meantime, Russia has been busy exploiting the EU’s inexplicable and discriminatory procrastination to make inroads into the region, most notably in Serbia and Bulgaria and, more recently, in North Macedonia.

As European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyden, admitted recently, at the GLOBSEC conference in Bratislava, “it is not enough to say that the door is open”. Indeed, ‘tis not.

Von Leyden came up with the solipsistic proposal to grant the mostly agricultural Balkan polities access to Europe’s digital market mechanisms and tools, including its e-commerce and cybersecurity aspects. This would increase the trade in physical goods and in services, she pronounced oracularly.

She reiterated the typical vow to increase pre-accession funding, but, as usual, refrained from pegging a number on her largesse. This kind of bribery (or ransom) has been going on for decades, leading exactly nowhere.

On the sidelines, informally, the Commission mooted the tantalizing possibility of granting the patient countries of the Balkans access to Europe’s Horizon funding for innovation and research and development.

Equally the EU’s TEN-T, its trans-European transport network policy, could soon open its doors to the expectant wannabe members.

Both proposals are surrealistic in their irrelevance. The countries of the western Balkans require investments in infrastructure, advanced farming, manufacturing, tourism, and education, not in cybersecurity and cross-continental high speed trains.

By far the most offending gesture was the mealy-mouthed invitation to the ambassadors of the long-spurned candidates to sit in on preparatory meetings of the council in Brussels, sharing a conference table with representatives of the actual constituents of the hallowed Union.

The urbane Minister of Foreign Affairs of North Macedonia, Bujar Osmani, welcomed closer integration pre-accession, but in thinly disguised exasperation, warned that the region is just “hanging” and in dire need of “scaffolding”.

He recalled previous instances of fervid imminent accession that faded together with the emergencies that bred them. In 2015, when migrants made the western Balkans their preferred gateway to Europe, the EU called for swift integration. Such talk dwindled as the smuggling of Syrian and other refugees abated. 

Another Albanian, the Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, bitterly reminisced on how the countries of the EU stingily hoarded COVID-19 jabs and refused to share them with the decimated locales of the Western Balkans. On that occasion, some of these countries turned to Russia, Turkey, and China as well as to their regional proxies (Serbia) to beg for the life-saving vaccines.

In the meantime, tensions in the region are again ramping up. Kosovo and Serbia are at each other’s throats on a host of bilateral issues. Serbian President, Alexander Vucic, cancelled his participation in GLOBSEC, presumably irked and incensed by the belated inclusion of the Kosovar Prime Minister, Albin Kurti.

The EU’s foreign policy honcho, Josep Borrell, and the envoy to the region, Miroslav Lajcak, were left idle as the much anticipated round of talks in Bratislava failed to materialize. Montenegro’s President, Milo Djukanovic, half-jokingly reminded the grandees that, in the Balkans, no one knows what the day will bring.

The Western Balkans has always been a powder keg. Only the prospect of EU accession is keeping it pacified, collaborative, and compliant with norms of civility and liberal-democracy.

But hope alone cannot sustain this departure from previous history. China and Russia are making inroads. It is high time to render the European Union more European and finally fully united.

Lord Michael Heseltine, a Conservative (Tory) stalwart, called, on the seventh anniversary of the infamous referendum, to reverse Brexit. He cited damage to the economy and to the reputation of the United Kingdom, as well as the “frustration of our younger generation”.

Years of turmoil – the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, Boris Johnson’s shenanigans – masked the pernicious outcomes of the inane and self-defeating decision to exit the European Union.

The UK’s regional economies and exports are shrinking. The country is headed to an economic performance that may be as bad as sanction-ridden Russia’s. From university research to airports, Britain is a mess.

Now, even avowed Brexiteers are calling to reconsider the fateful breakup. But Europe should resolutely reject any attempt by the UK to rejoin its ranks. The EU needs to send an unequivocal and firm message that it is the gateway to prosperity, not a revolving door.

The EU stands to gain little from a re-accession of the UK. Even prior to Brexit, Britain’s net contribution to the EU’s budget, corrected for its rebate, was a paltry 5-6% of the total. The EU is the UK’s largest trading partner and export destination. It is also the largest investor in the UK. The economic asymmetry in favor of the UK is glaring.

Throughout its reluctant history in the EU, the UK has been an aggressively disruptive and often Europhobic force. Time and again, it obstructed progress on a multitude of issues.

Never a team player, the UK’s main contributions to the Union amounted to rancor and dysregulation. Geopolitically, it willingly served as an America Trojan horse amidst the European family. Rather than constitute an Anglophone bridge across the pond and thus enhance the EU’s CFSP clout – it rendered the EU irrelevant and fractured.

The Brexit campaign exposed “multicultural” Britain for what it truly is: ochlocratic, Euroskeptic, xenophobic, and populist. The EU does not need another Hungary or Poland in its ranks.

The UK’s is the fifth largest economy in the world. But it has never truly integrated with the other members of the EU. Nor was the UK influential in terms of policymaking: it failed spectacularly to export its liberal, anti-statist, and anti-protectionist principles precisely because it refused to apply them to its fraught relations with the EU bloc.

For a while, the UK served as an employment sink and employer of last resort to youth from Poland and other countries of the former Soviet sphere. But these Gastarbeiter were more than outweighed by well-paid British expats and by the millions of Brits who populated vast swathes of southern Europe.

Britain’s army was never properly consolidated with its continental counterparts. The UK did not cooperate with other members of the EU on foreign policy and security issues. It maintained its less than splendid isolation throughout its membership.

If the UK wishes to re-enter the EU, it should be offered a deal akin to Switzerland’s or Norway’s. This is the natural solution to any future re-integration.

The UK should rejoin EFTA and then the EEA. It could also sign bilateral agreements with the EU which would effectively extend the scope of the single market and its regulations to Britain.

Isolationism carries heavy reputational (soft power) and economic costs in today’s globalized world. No one can afford to go it alone. The aggressively haughty UK is learning this lesson the hard way.

Actions, choices, and decisions have consequences. A change of heart rarely cuts it even in individual affairs, let alone in the international arena. The EU has to keep the perfidious UK at arm’s length exactly as one would his divorced ex.

In clinical psychology, the behavior is known as self-defeat, self-harm, or self-destructiveness. In the annals of the European Union (EU), it is known simply as Brexit.

On January 30, 2020, following years of arduous negotiations often bordering on extortion on both sides, the United Kingdom have exited the EU.

In 2016, in a referendum unwisely called by David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister at the time, about half of Britons (51%) voted for this act of self-immolation, spurred by nationalist populism and anti-elitism.

How did Britain fare in the wake of Brexit?

Hard to tell. Global disruptions to supply chains, investments, and consumption owing to COVID-19, the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, and climate change have utterly distorted the gathering of data and have rendered statistics doubtful.

In the UK, the economy grew by 4.1% in 2022 and succeeded to match EU growth rates in 2023 and 2024, according to provisional figures. The ONS (Office for National Statistics) chronicled a recovery from the pandemic: by September 2023, economic activity was 1.5% higher than prior to the global cataclysm.

This is comparable to France, considerably more than Germany’s, and dismally lower than the likes of Japan, let alone the USA. The Brexit gamble did not pay off in terms of enhanced growth and FDI: the UK is still tethered to the continent, economically at least.

The figures are profoundly misleading, though. Inflation in the UK ratcheted up to 10% in 2022. Exports to the EU have declined, subjected as they are to new bureaucratic impediments.

Unencumbered by EU red tape and veto power, the UK signed bilateral trade agreements with Australia and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But this is a far cry from the grandiose promises of the economically illiterate promoters of Brexit. Negotiations with the likes of Canada and India – far more relevant trade partners – seem to languish.

A country’s currency is the best gauge of its crowdsourced monetary, fiscal, and trade health. The British Pound stood at 1.40 to the euro in 2015. It is now trading at c. 1.15. Enough said.

Such precipitous decline is supposed to encourage exports (which it hasn’t) and domestic consumption (which it has, having rendered ever more expensive imports far less affordable).

Migration was a main point of contention between the UK and the more lenient EU. It is ironic, therefore, that migration actually surged and has reached new highs post-Brexit.

According to the venerable newspaper Le Monde, the flow of incomers doubled after Brexit, to 682,000 people between June 2022 and June 2023.

To make matters worse, a net 330,000 qualified personnel abandoned the splendidly isolated isles, creating labor shortages and an inflationary pressure on wages.

Newly instituted border controls between the UK and the EU adversely affect both tourism and mobile workers, for example in the critical finance industry.

Short on friends in the continent, having negotiated Brexit in bad faith, the UK is turning even more emphatically to its former colony, the United States.

About three fifths of Britons now regard Brexit to have been a disastrous mistake. Only 30% still support it. Even its most ardent proponents, though, admit that the benefits of the maneuver will accrue only in the long-run.

The EU, in the meantime, has rid itself of an abusive and intractable partner reminiscent of Hungary. It has been functioning more smoothly ever since, gradually reverting to its original charter as a free trade pact.

The EU has survived multiple traumas in the past two decades, including major financial crises, energy dependency on a foe (Russia), and COVID-19. But it is badly scarred and wounded.

The EU’s response to these variegated exigencies has always been attempts at closer, often coerced integration: joint procurement, common debt, the same legal space, and shared foreign, security, and defense policies.

But this integrative reflex militates for a tighter, smaller, and more contained union. As it is, consensus among all existing members is near impossible to build on critical issues such as foundational values of democracy and the rule of law or over Brussels’s reach and control of the internal affairs of its constituents and constituencies.

This rancor and acrimony gave rise to populism and xenophobic nationalism everywhere and to an almost exclusive emphasis on the bilateral rather than the multilateral.

North Macedonia’s drawn out accession process is the most glaring example of this shift in emphasis, hampered as it was by Greece and Bulgaria, its disgruntled neighbors. Similarly, Hungary threatens to veto Ukraine’s mooted membership over its alleged mistreatment of the Hungarian minority in its midst.

The truth is that the EU has reached its absorption capacity long ago: it has been rendered inefficacious by successive waves of widely-disparate new members whose entry had been geopolitically motivated in the first place.

The EU has stagnated. It is unable to regulate itself through the maze of inane unanimity and qualified voting rights and the misallocation of its minuscule budgetary resources via cohesion funds for the more indigent members.

An egregious example of such misguided profligacy is the Common Agricultural Policy, one of the main impediments to the accession of Ukraine, an agricultural powerhouse. Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia are now faced with a WTO complaint filed by Ukraine over their bans of its grain entering their domestic markets.

The looming threat or a re-emerging Russia is not an impetus for enlargement. On the very contrary: the invasion of Ukraine engendered a siege mentality in the bloc. The European Political Community – an initiated polylogue among leaders, most recently in Granada – is intended to forestall accession, not to hasten it. It is about displacement, not resolve.

There is now talk of Macron’s “gradual integration”. After two decades of infertile talks, it is an interesting and welcome departure from conventional bureaucratese. But it is dead on arrival, literally impossible to implement without a major disruption to the EU’s daily business.

At heart is a debate about the very purpose of enlargement: is it a geostrategic tool or a functional and merit-based expansion of a common market with shared values?

If it is the former, then some candidates, like Ukraine, would enjoy a fast lane, ignoring the merits of their applications and the unforeseeable outcomes of war, while others languish in an apparently interminable process.