More than twenty years have passed since the European Union promised the Western Balkans full integration into the project of a united Europe. Since then, the region has remained suspended in a kind of limbo, with accession always seeming out of reach because of delays, processes that are at times too technical and at times too political, and the real difficulties these countries face in aligning themselves with European legislation.

And yet, the EU enlargement process involving Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia is showing ever more clearly that this is not simply a “shopping list” to be completed in order to secure a place in the Union.

Grassroots protests, such as those currently taking place in Albania, highlight the deep tensions running through the region in terms of environmental protection and respect for the rule of law: two of the EU’s founding values, which Brussels can defend by deploying the full arsenal of enlargement policy. In other words, the EU can become a barrier against the threats posed by global capital for all those countries that aspire to become members of the Union.

Albania and European Standards

Albania is precisely the place to start in order to understand how grassroots mobilisation is calling on Brussels to take a more active role in bringing governments back into line when they give in to aggressive development models driven by deregulation and speculation, while at the same time invoking the path towards European integration as their only strategic goal.

The protests in Tirana and across the country mark a civic awakening in the relationship between citizens and institutions. At the centre of the controversy is the project by Affinity Partners, the US investment firm owned by Jared Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law — which envisages transforming the island of Sazan and hundreds of hectares of the protected Vjosa-Narta area into luxury resorts and apartments.

“Nature before money. Albania is not for sale.” With messages of this kind, thousands of citizens are demanding principles that, at least in theory, should lie at the heart of the European Union project: transparency, accountability, public consultation, protection of the natural environment, and democratic control over power. The population of a country that is not yet a member of the Union — but aspires to become one soon — has begun to use the language of the EU as a tool of domestic political resistance.

When governance practices clash with the commitments a government has made as part of the accession process, European standards become internationalised, making citizens even more aware that their demands for transparency and participation must be met, without ifs or buts. European environmental rules have the full potential to become a civic shield through which people can claim the right to a healthy environment, public consultation, and the protection of shared heritage.

But this is where theory collides with reality. Are EU institutions truly ready to act as guarantors and allies of a European activism — extending beyond the Union’s current borders — that emerges from below and defends the common good? Because if Brussels ignores this demand for transparency and accountability, it risks losing a huge source of influence across the region: the trust that EU accession will translate into a future that is not plundered.

The Threat of Corrosive Capital

The Affinity Partners project in Albania is only the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon that, unless Brussels addresses it decisively, could spread across an already pressured region and create a serious problem for the Europe of the future.

By “corrosive capital” we mean investments negotiated at the highest levels and without transparency, often accompanied by ad hoc laws that sidestep environmental regulations and public procurement rules. This creates zones of exception where the rule of law is suspended in the name of strategic development: a clear violation of the rule of law, which cannot be accepted under Brussels’ rules of the game. And yet corrosive capital is expanding further and further across the Balkans, driven by companies based in the United States or the United Arab Emirates.

For example, in Belgrade, the company owned by Trump’s son-in-law had proposed the Trump Tower project, a 500-million-dollar complex of luxury hotels and apartments at the expense of the protected cultural heritage of the ruins of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defence, an architectural landmark in the centre of the Serbian capital. In the same city, the effects of real estate speculation and corruption in the name of urban development have been visible for the past ten years. The Belgrade Waterfront project, developed by the UAE-based Eagle Hills Properties, has had a major environmental impact on the right bank of the Sava River and has created a sort of ghost city made up of skyscrapers with apartments priced at 11,000 euros per square metre, where nobody lives.

Similar dynamics, driven by the same Abu Dhabi-based investment company, can also be observed in Albania — with the project to transform the port of Durrës, one of the largest in the Adriatic — and in Montenegro, the most advanced candidate in the EU accession negotiations. The agreement on the possible construction of luxury resorts along the 13 kilometres of Ulcinj/Ulqin beach — currently stalled after mobilisation by the local community — was reached between the government in Podgorica and the United Arab Emirates without any consultation with the local administration or civil society on the environmental and economic impact, in a town that depends almost entirely on summer tourism.

Development projects that circumvent the rules in the Balkan region expose a structural weakness in Brussels. If agreements between global capital and governments aspiring to join the Union systematically bypass the set of rights and obligations that make up the EU legal order, then the enlargement process itself risks undermining the entire European project in the eyes of citizens. The Union risks becoming an empty framework that indirectly legitimises — rather than limits — processes of speculation and the privatisation of public space. And this is a dangerous game.

Pushing on Chapter 27

In truth, the EU already has a tool to counter these drifts. European legislation, which binds all member states to comply with environmental standards under penalty of infringement procedures, can also influence candidate countries through the alignment required by the European integration process.

Chapter 27 of the negotiations, which defines the rules on “Environment and Climate Change”, is in every respect an institutional brake on wild and deregulated development. Although it is extremely costly to implement, as Montenegro has complained — requesting transition periods even after accession — this negotiation chapter can be understood as the framework that imposes minimum standards for environmental protection, impact assessments and transparent procedures which, if properly applied, make aggressive development operations very difficult.

As in the case of the protests in Albania, the environmental legislation required of candidate countries is the natural ally of citizens in the region who have already become aware of their rights in opposing the privatisation of shared space. The European paradox does not lie so much in the rigidity of EU rules, which have the capacity to actively protect the future of potential member states, but rather in their possible selective application. If standards are circumvented through derogations or political pressure, the enlargement process loses credibility and trust in the Union can only be destroyed.