[Interview] ‘It’s now or never’ for enlargement, Montenegro’s former EU ambassador warns

If internal EU politics were to block Montenegro’s accession in 2028, it would risk killing Western Balkans enlargement and leaving a “black hole” in Europe, a veteran diplomat from Podgorica told EUobserver. “I’m afraid it’s now or never,” said Bojan Šarkić, former Montenegro ambassador to the EU from 2016 to 2020. “If it doesn’t happen, that would be a very bad signal to everyone in the region. The reaction would be: ‘Look at these Montenegrins. They did everything they were asked to do by the EU and what did they get? Nothing’,” he added. “It would confirm what eurosceptics in the region have been saying – and there are quite a few of them. Just switch on Serbian TV, every day you hear: ‘The EU is falling apart. Look at the demonstrations in France’,” he said. “And all this creates fertile soil for interference by other countries,” Šarkić said, referring to Russia. The 67-year-old diplomat, who retired last year, spoke to EUobserver as the European Commission prepared to publish its annual reports on the 10 candidate countries in line to join one day the 27-nation bloc – the six Western Balkan states, Georgia, Moldova, Turkey, and Ukraine. Šarkić began his diplomatic career in the former Yugoslavia in 1987, spent four years in Moscow in what was then the Soviet Union, before being sent to London and Brussels. Croatia was the last country to join the EU, in 2013. Following the EU's migration crisis in 2015, enlargement appetite waned, while Turkey's post-coup crackdown in 2016 saw its talks put on hold. In the past two years, democratic backsliding in Georgia and Serbia also saw their talks frozen. But at the same time, Russia's full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 created a new geopolitical imperative to save the Western Balkans and post-Soviet states from becoming what Šarkić called a "black hole" of instability and Russian meddling in Europe. The EU fast-tracked Moldova and Ukraine's accession bids, while Armenia also peeled away from Russia and now aimed to formally apply for membership in 2027 or 2028. "In my time in Brussels, I had top politicians in the EU, in the Council, in the European Commission, telling me to forget about becoming a member of the EU in the forthcoming future," said Šarkić. "And while the EU was slow and lazy on enlargement, Russia was not lazy at all in trying to build its influence in the region," he said.