Greek Crisis ‘Undermined Balkan EU Accession Hopes’

The report published this week examined two decades of trade and foreign relations between Athens and its Balkan neighbours and found that the economic crisis and crippling recession that hit Greece since the 2008 debt crisis severely hurt its neighbours’ chances for a speedy accession in the EU.

As the crisis turned Greece from one of the EU’s success stories to its black sheep, it added another taint of disrepute to a region as whole, damaging its image.

“The Balkan region is already perceived as a region with high levels of corruption and political instability, not much government transparency, judicial inefficiency and little significant structural reforms,” Ritsa Panagiotou, co-author of the report, told Balkan Insight.

“The Greek predicament is being used by enlargement sceptics to propagate the perception of the entire Balkan region as an unreliable area of corruption and instability, where very little convergence with EU criteria has actually been achieved,” she added.

The report notes that the collapse of the communist regimes in the Balkans after 1989 offered an opportunity for Athens to step forward and claim its role as a regional leader, as the only country in the region with a consolidated democracy, and membership of NATO and the EU.

After the implosion of the centrally planned economies of its neighbors, Greece established itself in the 1990s as a leading trade and investment partner for its Balkan neighbours until the 2008 debt crisis hit.

By 2008, Greek banks had established a network of about 20 subsidiaries in the region, employing more than 23,000 people, while accounting for 30 per cent of the banking sector in Bulgaria and Macedonia, 25 per cent in Albania, and 17 per cent in Serbia and...