ABSTRACT
The demise of communism in the Balkans was followed by a series of wars and armed conflicts and resulted in the creation of many new independent states. The legacies of war, unresolved bilateral disputes, internal democratic and ethnic struggles, and countries' EU aspirations come at a time of increasingly complex security environment, threatened by the presence of non-Western foreign policy actors, as was seen from the third section of this book. After the post-conflict stabilisation and consolidation phase, when the EU, NATO, and OSCE paved the way for establishing the security regime, backsliding in the military sector came into play. There is an old joke – when Albania joins the European Union, the EU will fall apart. Stability in the region will be preserved providing the EU and NATO remain present.
