BRUSSELS, October 6. /TASS/. The European Union is dragging its feet on the admission of some Balkan nations into the alliance and is losing its influence in the region, giving way to Russia and China, said American analysts Pablo Rasmussen and Robert Benson in a column they contributed to the Euractiv portal.
"The Western Balkans Six (WB6) remain stuck in the waiting room of EU membership. Negotiations have slowed to a crawl, hobbled by enlargement fatigue in European capitals, immigration anxieties, and fears that new members would paralyse already cumbersome decision-making in the bloc," the column read.
Experts believe that the process of integration of the Balkans into the European Union has turned into a farce due to the very mechanism of accepting new members according to "chapters," that is, certain benchmarks for fulfilling obligations. According to the analysts, the leaders of the Balkan countries "close their chapters," participate in summits with the EU leadership and make statements, but "the horizon of full membership keeps receding. Every broken promise, every deferred action chips away at the Union’s leverage, signalling to would-be members that reforms may not be rewarded and to rival powers that Europe’s commitments can be safely ignored."
