OSCE and Civil Society in the Western Balkans: The Road to Reconciliation

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Official Discrepancies: Kosovo Independence and Western European Rhetoric

This article examines approaches and official discrepancies characterising Western European rhetoric with regard to the Kosovo status question. Since the early 1980s, Kosovo has been increasingly present in European debates, culminating with the 1999 international intervention in the region and subsequent talks about its final status. Although the Kosovo Albanians proclaimed independence in February 2008 and the majority of EU Member States decided to recognise Kosovo as an independent state, Western European rhetoric has been rather divided. This article shows that in addition to five EU members who have decided not to recognise Kosovo from the very beginning, and thus are powerful enough to affect its further progress, both locally and internationally, some of the recognisers, although having abandoned the policy of ‘standards before status’, have also struggled to develop full support for the province – a discrepancy that surely questions the overall Western support for Kosovo’s independence

Policy brief: Outta trust? (Post)-pandemic trust and democratic resilience in the Western Balkans

In the Western Balkans, issues linking trust and democracy acquire particular importance and urgency in the wake of the Covid crisis. Based on a large-scale public opinion poll carried out in the six countries of the Western Balkans, this brief shows that the pandemic has exacerbated the region’s issues with trust in public institutions even further. The study finds that the reticence of publics to undergo vaccination is directly linked with mistrust in governments, corroborating earlier research by BiEPAG that warned about the wide diffusion of coronavirus-related conspiracy theories in the region and their relation with vaccine scepticism. The brief also points to the profiling of a trend termed ‘authoritarian production of trust’ in the largest country of the region, Serbia. Yet, it also identifies a ‘constituency of change’ with similar characteristics across the region: a picture that opens space to invest trust in new actors able to advance genuine progressive causes in South East Europe, beyond and instead of captured institutions and the respective party establishments