The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) held its 2018 Annual Council Meeting in Paris, France. Prime Minister Edi Rama attended the Forum’s panel on the Western Balkans and the region’s European perspective. In his remarks, PM Rama underlined why the European integration process is instrumental to the Western Balkans and why road to EU membership will help these countries to further modernize.

Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks:

Thank you very much for this opportunity at this frustrating moment for us, because we are now in a phase that we have to deal with very difficult interlocutors. And frankly saying we are at a phase that is difficult to live with when it comes to what we think about the European Union and what we experience about the European Union.

What I want to say is simply that it is clear that for some member states the problem lays in their own internal politics, in their own changes within their society and the frustration about the European Union, but when it comes to dealing with us they don’t say it, but cite other reasons and this is very frustrating.

I would like to stress that going towards the goal of getting the positive recommendation from the European Commission to open the accession negotiations has not been easy at all and to me it sounds quite strange that the member states question the objectivity and capacity of the European Commission to go over details and have an assessment that is loyal to the reality.

An again, this is frustrating, because on one hand the member states pay, I don’t know how much money, probably millions to get this machine working and on the other hand when this machine produces what is supposed to produce they question it.

The problem is that they don’t question based on any further accuracy of facts, but they question it based on political interest in their own backyard and so this is not really very inspiring.

I am not going to develop more about this disconnection works for the real need for Europe to get the Balkans as closer as possible in terms of the geostrategic interest and how far from this are the ongoing discussions when it comes to doing for us something that frankly it is not even clear what it is that implies any sacrifice on their side, because at the end we are what we are asking.

We are asking a prescription of further reforms that would help the country be focused and that would give the country the only and unique instrument of modernization we can’t find elsewhere, because we have said it several times that our countries suffer a lot from the lack of democratic or even state tradition and the integration process is very beneficial to all of us, not only because we will become members one day, but, first and foremost, because on this journey it helps us to modernize.

We are asking for a prescription for the therapy and the inspections about how good are we in taking pills, and we are not even asking pills, since we have to produce them.

So it costs nothing in terms of money. It has absolutely nothing to do with any concrete enlargement today and telling us that you have to wait first, because if we give you the prescription some people in our own countries will go nuts and would talk about enlargement and we can’t deal with them. It looks too weak and too disappointing.

I would conclude by saying one thing that my feeling is that they don’t really understand what it is all this about that we are so much keen to go forward with this process.

I believe that for us here, for all of us here is one thing that makes us be so much connected throughout this process because we have seen war. For us, war is not something in black and white on Netflix, but something that has been in our real life and that’s why Europe is for all of us a place where we will definitely save the future of our kids to make sure that the ghosts of the past will not come back.