ABSTRACT
Subregional cooperation poses a major challenge for the countries of Europe’s emerging “boundary zones,” consisting of south-eastern Europe, the western Newly Independent States (NIS) and the southern NIS. Intensified multilateral cooperation could help the countries of these subregions to address the enormous difficulties they face in managing political change, promoting economic development, overcoming conflicts, and integrating themselves into the European mainstream. However, the very problems that would be mitigated by greater subregional cooperation – political instability, authoritarianism, nationalism, economic underdevelopment, internal and external conflicts, international isolation – also make such cooperation difficult to achieve in practice. This tension raises the question of how far external actors, particularly the main European and international organizations, can and should play a role in promoting multilateral cooperation in these subregions.
