Brussels likes its Balkans in chapters. Chapter 23: judiciary. Chapter 24: justice, freedom, and security. Chapter 27: environment. Chapter 35: other issues. Tick the boxes, reform the institutions, pass the laws, appoint the committees, produce the paperwork and Europe will eventually open the door.
Meanwhile, the water is disappearing. That is the absurdity at the heart of the European Union’s enlargement conversation in 2026. Ursula von der Leyen is touring the Western Balkans again, talking about accession, reforms, integration and the €6 billion Growth Plan. The language is familiar: momentum, movement, membership. And yes, democratic institutions, functioning courts, and accountable governments matter. But there is something rather more primitive that tends to escape bureaucratic Brussels: people need water to live.
Look at Lake Koroneia in northern Greece. Once a major wetland, a refuge for migratory birds, and a source of livelihoods, it has collapsed to less than a tenth of its former size after years of declining rainfall, rising temperatures, and excessive irrigation. The lake is not presenting Brussels with a legal problem; it is presenting Europe with a warning.
And that warning is screaming. The Balkans are one of Europe’s climate pressure points. Droughts, wildfires, floods, soil degradation, water scarcity, and agricultural disruption do not respect borders, accession chapters, or the Schengen timetable. A river does not stop at a customs post because one country is an EU member and the other is waiting outside. A wildfire does not ask whether a government has completed its judicial reforms.
Yet European policy still too often treats the environment as another technical chapter to be closed rather than as the infrastructure of political survival. That is dangerously backward. What happens when farmers cannot reliably irrigate their fields? When hydropower becomes unpredictable? When forests burn repeatedly? When drinking-water systems become inadequate? When villages lose agricultural income and young people leave? When people begin moving because the land can no longer support them?
That is not some distant climate scenario. It is the beginning of political instability. The EU cannot seriously discuss enlargement while treating green infrastructure as a decorative attachment to accession. If Brussels wants a stable Western Balkans, it must invest in reservoirs, modern irrigation, wastewater treatment, cross-border river management, drought-resistant agriculture, renewable energy, forest restoration, and resilient cities. It must finance adaptation with the same political urgency it applies to roads, railways, and border systems.
Otherwise, Europe will build excellent transport corridors through increasingly uninhabitable landscapes.
There is also an uncomfortable hypocrisy here. Brussels demands that Balkan governments strengthen institutions, fight corruption, and improve governance. Fine. But environmental collapse itself exposes the weakness of governance. When water becomes scarce, every broken institution becomes more dangerous. Illegal extraction, political patronage, uncontrolled construction, agricultural overuse, and environmental corruption can turn a drought into a social crisis.
Climate policy, therefore, is not separate from enlargement policy. It is enlargement policy. The EU should stop imagining the Western Balkans as a collection of candidates waiting patiently outside Europe's bureaucratic door. These countries are already part of Europe's ecological system. Their rivers, forests, mountains, farms, and coastlines are European assets and European vulnerabilities.
If the European project means anything beyond moving paperwork from one desk to another, it must understand that security begins with water, food, functioning ecosystems, and communities capable of surviving the next summer.
Brussels can count accession chapters until the paperwork catches fire. The Balkans cannot afford to wait. The lake is disappearing. The question is whether Europe will notice before the people start disappearing with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment