According to U.S. and EU officials, transatlantic coordination, communication and cooperation is excellent, and has improved substantially over the last few years. Meetings between the EU, U.S. State Department and OSCE officials occur regularly and conversations happen on a daily basis. The most important elements of the policy toward the Western Balkans are EU led and U.S. supported. This cooperation was most apparent in the Serbia-Kosovo negotiations that were restarted this year. The U.S. has joined the EU on policies dealing with specific issues, such as women’s empowerment, economic development and housing for refugees and internally displaced people. The overall policy of Euroatlantic integration is openly supported not only in Washington and Brussels, but also by civil society: opinion polls consistently reveal that EU accession is what the people of the region want.

Over the course of 2011 a number of European analysts of US foreign relations predicted that in the future American foreign policy would have a new focus in Asia-Pacific. Stemming primarily from a political economy perspective that focuses on the impact of the market growth in leading emerging economies, this vision highlights the influence of Asia. This argument requires the thinking that geopolitical stability in Western Europe and the Mediterranean area, together with the politics of power and the politics of diplomacy matter less now than they did at any time since the Second World War.

A key question popping up in 2011 will very likely continue to shape policy discussions and debates in the Western Balkans in 2012: why doesn’t the “magnetic pull” of Europe seem to be resulting in reform and progress in Bosnia and Herzegovina? The “transformative power” thesis that grounds the European Union’s engagements in pre-accession countries is predicated on the assumption that the promised riches of membership will drive domestic leaders in any EU-hopeful country to align their country’s policies and practices with the norms required by the Club.[1] The wave of accession over the past decade is used as an illustration of the success of this model. Poland, Hungary and Malta benefitted from the technical rigors of EU accession preparation, followed not so long after by even Bulgaria and Romania. Surely this process promotes and results in the political, social and economic change desired to preserve and expand the European experiment, and to move towards an “ever closer union.”

According to the logic of conditionality, the promise of membership is the key incentive that compels politicians to implement difficult reforms, and it is the EU’s main tool in the accession process. For many reasons, however, conditionality is not working in the Western Balkans in the same way it had in previous enlargements.

After all the hard work that the international community has put in establishing and funding the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the huge and prolonged efforts expensed at processes of European Union accession, it must be extremely disappointing to international actors to accept the profound illegitimacy that both the ICTY and much of EU institutions face in the region today.

The European Union has many partners supporting its enlargement toward the Western Balkans. This meeting focused on the role played by individual EU member states and the United States in helping the EU to promote its enlargement agenda. This Policy Brief summarizes the discussion and proposals for improving policy coordination and effectiveness among all international actors.

In previous enlargements, civil society played an important role in supporting the goal of EU accession in candidate countries: civil society compelled political parties to cooperate in order to meet accession reform goals and punished parties during elections that did not make progress on the EU path. For a variety of reasons, this dynamic is missing In the Western Balkans. This Policy Brief summarizes Working Group meeting participants' analysis of civil society dynamics in the region and proposed policy strategies and programs that might improve civil society engagement in the region.

The first meeting focused its largely informal discussion on the unique problems of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, where the EU's enlargement conditionality seems least effective. This Policy Brief summarizes the participants' analysis and policy innovations that were discussed during the meeting.