The Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama, the President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić, and the Prime Minister of North Macedonia Zoran Zaev held an online meeting in the framework of the regional cooperation. A joint statement was issued after the meeting.
Joint statement by the Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama
The President of the Republic of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić
The Prime Minister of North Macedonia Zoran Zaev
We met today to discuss the further steps on our regional cooperation as a vital way forward for our countries, the Western Balkans, for Europe and the European path as a whole.
Our countries are part of Europe and will always be. The Western Balkans need the EU as much as the EU needs them.
The repeated failure of the EU to deliver on its promises and its inability to move forward by opening the first intergovernmental conferences with Albania and North Macedonia, goes against the European will of our countries and against EU interests as well.
Our history and our future are European, and we live in a region surrounded by the EU borders. In the challenging context caused by an already long-standing status quo of the Union vis-a-vis our EU integration process, we remain even more committed to our EU path and to our regional cooperation.
We want to see sooner rather than later that the four freedoms of the EU – movement of people, goods, services, and capital – are implemented across the region. And we will do everything in our hands to deliver on this goal through the power of our example. In this spirit, we will express our full support for the regional common market at the Berlin Process Summit on July 5th.
We know that only by working together and fostering regional cooperation in the framework of various regional initiatives – Common Regional Market, Regional Schengen, Green Lanes or more broadly, the Berlin Process – we would yield tangible results to our citizens. As a region of approximately 18 million people we can boost together our economy, increase the welfare of our people and attract major investments that otherwise would not be possible for any one of us alone.
On July 29th we will meet in person in Skopje to review progress and to sign agreements implementing Berlin Summit commitments among our three countries, on cooperation and assistance in the case of natural disasters, and facilitation of trade, exports and imports in our countries. We invite and encourage our colleagues in the region to sign and implement similar agreements so that the vision of shared political and economic space across the Western Balkans through the single market soon becomes an important part of our citizens’ everyday lives. In that spirit, we hope to invigorate the process of cooperation among us in the whole region, and we will continue to do our best to make it happen.
In the light of the difficulties caused by delays in the enlargement process, we believe that we can still identify new ways, cooperation policy areas, and financial instruments and strengthen the existing ones so that we enhance our contribution to Europe, our relationship with the EU and integrate the region gradually to the European single market.
So we decided today to ask the European Union that together with the United States take a step with us, and our colleagues across the region.
We aim to develop near-term projects that attract investments to protect our environment and increase large-scale use of renewables. This would be part of the implementation of the EU Economic and Investment Plan and of the Green Agenda for the Western Balkans. Our countries have enormous potential for sustainable growth and development of this sector. We will ask for practical support in identifying the projects, which, on a large scale, can turn our region into a source of renewable energy to the benefit of our citizens and to the EU’s green energy future. We are looking forward to reporting progress on specific projects by the EU-Western Balkans Summit this fall.
We fully recognize and reiterate the importance of our region’s resources for Europe’s green transition. We therefore ask for the European Union, in close partnership with the United States, be part of developing those resources in ways that help the EU deliver on its plans while concurrently attracting more investment across our region, making it part of the European green transition.
Our peoples’ welfare and economic ties with the EU will grow as we become more integrated in European production and supply chains and contribute to the EU’s strategic autonomy. To this end, we are ready to do our part together and we will do whatever we can turn this shared effort into a common strength in facing the challenges of the future as a whole region of six actors.
Albania is Europe. North Macedonia is Europe. Serbia is Europe. The Western Balkans are Europe. We will do the difficult work to turn it into an everyday life reality.
