From France’s point of view, that undermines the whole point of European integration, namely, to prevent war with Germany and provide a platform for amplifying French power.

For as long as London actively championed enlargement and Berlin was basically supportive, Paris could not hope to block enlargement.

Now, however, with the UK on its way out of the EU and Germany politically paralysed, France has become increasingly explicit in its opposition, and has found support from peers such as the Netherlands and Denmark which worry about the consequences for organised crime and immigration of opening the EU up to the Balkans.

The one caveat in France’s position is its willingness in principle to accept an expansion of the EU, once its members agree the reforms needed to stabilise the fragile Eurozone. However, that remains as elusive a prospect as ever.

This matters because, since last decade, European integration has been the West’s device for displacing the Balkan peoples’ historical quest to establish nation states, of the kind that prevail in Western Europe.

European integration has been the West’s device for displacing the Balkan peoples’ historical quest to establish nation states, of the kind that prevail in Western Europe.

Back in the nineties, the US and its allies concluded that nation statehood could not be realised either peacefully or legally, and so imposed a compromise settlement that established independent states based on the borders inherited from the former Yugoslavia, but not nation states, because most of these newly independent states had large ethnic minorities.

As a palliative, the EU offered the peoples of the region the prospect of membership as a substitute for their core goal of national independence.

In doing so, its hope was that the process of joining the EU would change the nature of the region, transforming poor, authoritarian and non-consensual states into the kind of prosperous, democratic, law-bound polities where unhappy minorities would be permanently content to live.

On eventual accession, the various Balkan nations, currently divided by regional borders, could be reunited inside a borderless Europe — in effect, this was the Yugoslav solution, recast for the 21st Century.

So, the end of enlargement also marks the end of the West’s game plan for suppressing the region’s frustrated nationalisms, with the logical consequence that the peoples of the region will revive the business of nation state formation, left unfinished in the 1990s.

‘New Cold War’

That is already enough to create a combustible situation in the region. But the end of EU enlargement is also playing out in parallel with another international drama, namely the United States’ decision to fight the “New Cold War” in the Balkans.

Another international drama is the United States’ decision to fight the ‘New Cold War’ in the Balkans.

The origins of this date back to the crisis in Ukraine in 2013-14, to which Russia responded by trying to block the integration of those states in Eastern Europe which were not already members of NATO, including several in the Balkans.

Its mode of entry into the region’s politics was to back the grievances of local groups which were in conflict with the West, in return for a commitment not to join NATO.

Unsurprisingly, Washington viewed this as a challenge to the stability of its settlement in the Balkans and, after an absence of a few years, returned to the region with the aim of pushing Russia out and finishing the job of integrating the region into NATO.

The first clash came in North Macedonia in 2015, where the then-government became embroiled in a massive corruption scandal, fell out with the West and turned to Russia for support.

A two-year diplomatic battle then ensued at the end of which the US succeeded in ousting the government and replacing it with a pliant administration that prioritized NATO integration.

This was followed by a contest for influence in Montenegro, Russia’s oldest ally, which the Americans pressurised to switch sides and join NATO. They succeeded, but only after a Russian-backed attempt to assassinate the pro-NATO prime minister failed at the last minute.