Enlargement of the European Union and the Western Balkans
Enlargement of the European Union and the Western Balkans

Author(s): Avni Mazreku
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Politics, EU-Accession / EU-DEvelopment
Published by: Университет за национално и световно стопанство (УНСС)
Keywords: EU Integration; Western Balkans; EU Enlargement
Summary/Abstract: The fall of the communistic regimes in Eastern Europe that began in Poland in 1989 and continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania created a prospect of changes for the countries that experienced communist regimes for more than forty years. The success of those changes that can be qualified as democratic revolution also encouraged the constitutive federation units of the Former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, populated by non-¬Serbs, to break away from the Serbian¬-dominated, communist-oriented central government. Serious fighting broke out in the summer of 1991, as the northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, followed by Bosnia and Herzegovina. While the local Serbs were directly supported by the federal army, controlled and commanded by the Serbian Republic, they pretended to prevent separation from the federation of both republics (Slovenia and Croatia) ‘justifying’ its action by reference to ‘the need for protection’ of the Serbian population in the above mentioned federal units. The brutality of the war had not been experienced on the territory of Europe since World War II as it happened especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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