Western Balkan's attitudes regarding the EU integration

Abstract

Western Balkan countries aim to intensify their path toward the European Union as an opportunity to ensure peace, economic growth, and institutional sustainability. Apart from the regional challenges, the EU integration process of the WB is affected by different geopolitical challenges, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This paper addresses two broader major research questions: first, what is the attitude of the Western Balkans citizens regarding European integration? The second research question addresses the differences and commonalities at the country level and between the cities in the Western Balkans.

To address these questions, also considering many regional challenges, the paper employs Generalised Q analysis as a novelty of the paper, which facilitates the identification of common and different attitudes and relates them with the features of people and places. The analysis involved 243 valid responses from various cities in Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and North Macedonia. Finally, the results show that there are different perception typologies in other Western Balkan countries related to location. However, apart from these differences and heterogeneity, there is no alternative prospect to European Integration for these countries.