Please join us for a one-day conference organized by Professor Tanya Domi (Harriman Institute), featuring keynote speaker Professor Florian Bieber (University of Graz; Director, Centre for Southeast European Studies).
The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the U.S. and the UK’s decision to exit the EU has thrown the Atlantic world into crisis. The consequences of an Anglo-American retreat from constructive international engagement will be felt globally, but perhaps nowhere more so than the Western Balkans. Politically and historically wedged between the competing geopolitical, economic, and cultural influences of the U.S., Western Europe, Russia, and Turkey, the countries of the former Yugoslavia are particularly susceptible to international flux.
We convene these panels at a time of urgency in international and regional affairs. But we do so with an eye not merely on the potential crises but also the too often under-reported success stories: Macedonia’s civil society-led government change, Montenegro’s accession to NATO, the contested but nevertheless important legacies of war crimes prosecution and transitional justice, the progress on LGBT and minority rights legislation, and the still ongoing process of Euro-Atlantic integration, newly energized within the context of the so-called Berlin Process.
In short, the Western Balkans remain a space of vibrant social contestation, of both emerging illiberal trends and the social movements who resist them; of both persistent nationalist sectarianism and remarkable reconciliation; a region still scarred by war but determined in its peace building. And, above all, the Western Balkans are a region which, even as it spans the space between integration and marginalization by and within the Euro-Atlantic community, remains inexorably embedded within the political, economic, and security architecture of the West. If this fact is often neglected by policymakers and observers in Washington and Brussels at the best of times, in the midst of a global crisis of liberal democracy, the fate of the Western Balkans is an existential question for the overall stability of the post-World War II world order and its lynchpin institutions and regimes; the U.S., the EU, and NATO.
Although we gather to discuss the fate of the region after the shocks of Brexit and the Trump election, we do so convinced of the potential for democratic renewal and progress in the Western Balkans. We convene this conference with a gathering of some of the leading critical thinkers and policy practitioners in the region today. And we do so to collectively address two guiding questions: what is the future of the Western Balkans within the Euro-Atlantic order and what is the future of the Euro-Atlantic order within the context of the Western Balkans?
