EU's Costa Calls for Faster Western Balkans Membership Process

The European Union needs to find ways of speeding up the membership process for six Western Balkan candidate countries, European Council President Antonio Costa said on Thursday.

"For us, the enlargement, namely to the Western Balkans, is the most important geopolitical investment that the European Union is doing," Costa said during a joint press briefing with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade.

Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro have been seeking to join the bloc for some time now but have yet to complete the stringent process.

EU leaders meeting to find ways of making process 'faster and better'

"Tomorrow the European leaders will discuss with the leaders of the Western Balkans how we can improve our methodology to move forward faster and better," Costa said, stressing that this did not mean making the process "easier."

Costa went on to say that in order to "boost trust between each other," there should not be a "feeling of frustration from the acceding countries" and also from the EU.

"The enlargement is not a utopia but it is something that could be real in the coming years," Costa insisted. "For this we need to work harder and faster."

The EU-Western Balkans summit begins in Tivat, Montenegro, on Friday and provides an opportunity for leaders to assess progress on the path to EU membership.

Costa has been on a tour of the Western Balkans candidate states ahead of the Tivat summit and, on Thursday, told Serbia's populist president that his administration needed to boost democratic reform while aligning its foreign policy with that of the EU.

Belgrade has already been warned it could lose around €1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) in EU funds if it doesn't halt democratic backsliding.

Tensions between candidate states

Meanwhile, differences among the candidate states themselves threaten to overshadow the summit.

Host Montenegro on Wednesday banned 87 Serbs from entering the country, saying they posed a security threat. The men had arrived in Tivat on an Air Serbia flight with security agencies saying they had communication equipment and banners reading "Serbia wins."

Following the ban on the Serbian nationals, Serbia's security agency warned Vucic not to travel to Montenegro for Friday's summit, citing security threats.

Serbia's Security and Information Agency (BIA) ​said on Wednesday that a ​trip to Montenegro is a high security risk for Vucic due to "hostile activities of foreign secret services and a presence of a criminal clan there."

Twenty years after seceding from the state union with Serbia, Montenegro is seen as a Western Balkan frontrunner for EU membership but is battling corruption along with Belgrade's political influence.

Edited by: Sean Sinico