Thewesternbalkans
On October 6, 2025 leaders of the Western Balkans gathered in Albania for the Brdo-Brijuni summit, a regional initiative co-chaired by Slovenia and Croatia, with calls for stronger cooperation and a renewed push towards European Union membership.
Albanian President Bajram Begaj welcomed his counterparts in the coastal town of Golem, alongside Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar and Croatian President Zoran Milanović. The three countries co-host the Brdo-Brijuni Process, launched in 2010 to encourage dialogue and EU integration across the region.
Alongside Begaj, Pirc Musar and Milanović, the summit brought together Montenegrin President Jakov Milatović; Bosnian Presidency members Željka Cvijanović, Denis Bećirović and Željko Komšić; North Macedonia’s President Gordana Siljanovska Davkova; Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani and Serbian President Alexander Vučić.
What is the Brdo–Brijuni Process
The Brdo-Brijuni Process was launched in 2010 by former Slovenian President Borut Pahor and former Croatian President Ivo Josipović. It takes its name from Brdo pri Kranju in Slovenia and the Brijuni islands in Croatia, where the first meetings were held.
The initiative is of Slovenia and Croatia, EU member states, with the aim of supporting dialogue and cooperation between the countries of the Western Balkans and accelerating their European integration. The meetings are usually held annually, at the presidential level.
Brdo–Brijuni is the only format in which all leaders from the region sit at the same table, including Serbia and Kosovo — even when bilateral relations are tense. This allows for direct communication and trust-building, without intermediaries. In some years, the meeting has been the only platform for informal dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina.
The process regularly reaffirms the EU’s commitment to enlargement and is used as political pressure on Brussels to keep the Balkans on the agenda. For the EU, the forum is a convenient tool for “low-risk diplomacy” – without formal decisions, but with political messages.
The initiative complements the Berlin Process and other international frameworks for integrating the Western Balkans into the EU, while providing an annual platform for open dialogue on disputes and challenges in the region. While the Berlin Process is initiated by the EU, Brdo–Brijuni is a regional initiative – the Western Balkan countries themselves set the priorities. This strengthens the sense of subjectivity and regional responsibility and shows Brussels that the region is not waiting passively, but proposing solutions. This also explains the lack of representatives of the European Union’s top bureaucracy.
Agenda
This year’s summit was held under the motto “Common interests, shared commitment to a common future: Together towards the EU”. The agenda of the forum was focused on regional cooperation, good-neighbourly relations, the EU’s new Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, and policies to strengthen youth participation and retain skilled workers. In addition to a plenary session and joint press conference, leaders also organized bilateral meetings.
The gathering was not without tension. The summit marked the first face-to-face meeting between Kosovo’s Vjosa Osmani and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić following a recent war of words over regional security. This verbal war continued after the meeting, when Osmani accused Vučić of trying to disrupt the meeting by using insults and arrogance.
The Serbian president’s statements after his return to Serbia suggest that there were disputes and contradictions on many issues, including questions of territorial sovereignty, new military alliances in the Balkans, and differences in the countries’ interests. Such exchanges reflect the underlying fragility of the region, where the wounds of past conflicts remain close to the surface and where reconciliation is both a goal and a challenge. There has also been tension between the presidents of Slovenia and Croatia, who disagree over the unanimity rule in the EU decision-making process.
Final document
Although it does not lead to concrete agreements or funding, the forum carries high diplomatic weight – for example in coordinating common positions ahead of EU-Western Balkans summits.
The meetings usually end with a joint declaration reaffirming the participants’ commitment to closer cooperation, regional stability and progress toward EU accession. The final statements have taken different forms over the years, due to disputes and differences in positions. Some participants do not support the final statements, using the opportunity to object or omit sensitive issues. For example, in 2022, no joint declaration was adopted, only Conclusions, due to objections from Bosnia and Herzegovina to the inclusion of wording related to “legitimate representation of constituent peoples”. In 2023, at the meeting in Skopje on 11 September, the Skopje Declaration was adopted, while the 2024 meeting, held in Tivat, Montenegro, on October 8, produced a Presidential Statement. The Tivat Statement does not carry the same force as declarations, which are adopted unanimously, but it serves a similar function—a symbolic and political commitment to reform.
Joint declaration or Joint statement?
According to the website of the President of Albania, the Brdo-Brijuni Summit “ended with a joint declaration” of the presidents of the Brdo-Brijuni Process member states. The website of the Slovenian president also uses the term joint declaration. And the information about the summit on the website of the Croatian president focuses on the dispute with Slovenia over the EU veto and makes no mention of a final document.
No official final document has been published since the end of the Balkan Summit, but news articles, based on information from the Associated Press, report that a joint declaration was adopted, in which the leaders of the Western Balkans once again confirmed that the region’s integration into the EU remains their strategic priority. They reaffirmed their commitments to the European perspective, regional cooperation and accelerated reforms. The declaration notes that the countries are at different stages of the EU accession process, but calls for equal treatment and acceleration of reforms for the rule of law, democracy, transparency, etc.
The statements of the Balkan leaders during the meeting suggest that they had difficulty reaching a final declaration. It is not clear whether the statement includes specific deadlines, sanctions for non-compliance or precise performance indicators.
The lack of a published official declaration with great legal or political pressure can be interpreted as a sign that some topics remain sensitive and are not ready for public formulation by all parties. A weaker document, such as a Joint statement, creates a framework but does not guarantee concrete actions with commitments to action with specific deadlines, resources and mechanisms. The largely ceremonial nature of the Summit also explains the low media interest in it.
Speaking after the meeting, Croatian President Milanović said that no major conclusions or new initiatives were expected from the meeting, but rather an open discussion on the experiences and challenges faced by the countries of the region and the European Union itself. “One of the bigger problems at this moment is the inability or unwillingness of those who are the real or so-called European leaders to talk to global players. Because circumstances have changed and the EU is no longer the power it was believed to be until recently,” said President Milanović, who will host the Brdo-Brijuni Summit in 2026.
Photo: president.al
