Description
For the last one hundred years at least, regional cooperation between the Balkans’ countries has been under the strong influence of external factors – especially major powers. Today, it seems that the integrations of the Western Balkans show more similarities with the integration tendencies of the countries of the global South than the regional integrations in the Northern Hemisphere. In many areas (economic ties, political relations with third countries, security interdependence), the WB countries show significant, asymmetric relations with external actors (EU, Russia, USA, China) that decisively influence their regional economic integration’s motives and preferences, but also efficiency and dynamics of institutionalized regional cooperation. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukrainian crisis have only further highlighted this extra-regional dependence.
Therefore, this paper will seek to elaborate on the importance of external influence on the process of regional economic integration in the Western Balkans. It seems that this integration is determined by the positions of the most important EU countries (Germany and France) and the United States. Special attention will be paid to the analysis of the origin, dynamics, and efficiency of the institutional arrangements of the two existing, albeit competitive, regional economic integrations: Common Regional Market and Open Balkan.
