Upon her return from a visit to the region, on 6 March 2017, HR/VP Federica Mogherini stated that ‘the Balkans can easily become one of the chessboards where the big power game can be played’. Three days later the European Council held a discussion on the region and the European Council President’s conclusions of 9 March

2017 acknowledged the ‘fragile situation in the Western Balkans’ and the ‘internal and external challenges that the region is facing’. The conclusions then reaffirmed the EU’s unequivocal support for the European perspective of the Western Balkans and expressed the Union’s commitment and engagement to support the region in conducting EU-related reforms.

This EUISS Report is firmly anchored in the HR/VP’s analysis and the conclusions of European leaders. After several years of neglect, the Western Balkans have returned to the spotlight of the EU’s attention once again as a geopolitical arena where ‘big power games’ may threaten Europe’s stability as a whole and come to represent a test for the EU’s capacity to act on the world stage. However, much has changed since the beginnings of World War I, the Cominform period and also since the civil wars that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, to name just a few occasions when the Balkans constituted a risk for Europe or a test for the EU. The current fragility of the region is unlikely to lead to an open military conflict, neither between the countries on the peninsula nor among the big powers referred to by HR/VP Mogherini. More likely the region may become a geopolitical playground where rival powers vie for influence and different socio-economic and political systems as well as models of international order are tested, compared and played off against each other.