Countries in the Western Balkans will face a long and slow path towards EU accession, with membership in the bloc having to be earned the hard way, participants in the final panel of the Sofia Forum for the Balkans on June 9 2012 said.

Without any doubt, countries in the region have made progress, but it has been painstakingly slow, Milica Delević, director of the European Integration Office of the Serbian government, said.

“The question is how do we apportion blame for this. […] Is it a failure of the regional elites or the failure of the EU integration process,” she said.

Hearkening back to topics brought up repeatedly during the two days of the conference, Delević put the blame for the slow process on the unresolved identity issues plaguing many of the countries in the region and the economic downturn that has hit both the EU and the Balkans hard.

“It is not that the EU is giving up the enlargement process, but it is happening against a tougher background than the enlargement process of 2004 and 2007,” she said.

But despite all obstacles, the willingness to move forward was still present, but the process would not be an easy or a quick one, she said.

The EU was at point of “losing its innocence” concerning its enlargement achievements so far and what it can achieve in the future, the chairman of Turkey’s Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, Sinan Ülgen, said. The changes that will come about from the current crisis faced by the EU will inevitably change how future accession negotiations proceed.

“Past enlargements were characterised by what I call an ‘ex-ante aggregation of political will’ – what I mean by that is that when the EU decided to open accession negotiations, its pooled political will about enlargement had already crystallised. From then onwards it was really up to the candidate countries – the pace of the negotiations was dictated by the ability of the candidate countries to fulfil EU membership requirements,” Ülgen said.

In the future, the pace of enlargement will be determined by the political

will within the EU to expand the bloc’s membership. A full decade could pass before the next enlargement wave, even as the EU struggles with the question of whether it might have lost some of its soft power an appeal, he said.

Even so, the bloc remained attractive to the countries in the Western Balkans. “The flow of history will continue, it’s unavoidable that the Western Balkans will become member states of the EU, I think that’s unstoppable,” Ülgen said.

Slovakia’s Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajčák acknowledged that the progress made by Western Balkan countries on their EU accession path did not yield “overall results adequate to the efforts invested”, but cautioned that membership in the bloc should not be taken for granted.

Although important for the Western Balkans, EU integration was not the top priority – that spot was reserved for issues like national identity and borders, he said, echoing Milica Delević’s earlier comments.

“EU membership is not a gift, it is not something that the European Union owes [the Western Balkans], it is something that you deserve through reform, because the EU enlargement, after all, should strengthen the European Union, not weaken it, and make it more, not less, efficient,” Lajčák said.