The full membership process of Balkan countries to the European Union and Greece

Since the seventeenth century Europe and the Balkans mutually influenced each other; on the one hand several crises in the region contaminated the relationship between the European powers, and on the other, particularly ideologies and political movements in Europe changed the political, social and economic tissues of the Balkan peoples. After the Second World War, Balkans became an area from where both ideological blocks stood aloof. Furthermore, an important portion of it remained behind the notorious iron curtain, thereby further alienating Europeans to the region and its problems.EU started to deal with the problems of the region upon the collapse of the Soviet block and particularly with the process of dismemberment in formerly Socialist Yugoslavia. Despite the EU strategies to stabilize and help the region to undergo a stabile transition process; i.e., diplomatic recognition and subsequent assistance conditioned with solution of the problems regarding borders and ethnic minorities through dialogue and mutual empathy, the region plunged into turmoil and a decade-long political uncertainty. Balkan tragedies in Bosnia and Kosovo indicated that without USA, Europeaners could not overcome the crises happened even in their backyard. On the other side, the failures in avoiding crises in the region gave impetus to the European efforts to develop a common foreign and security policy.By the end of the 1990s, the EU took important initiatives to bring stability, peace and prosperity to the region. Thanks to eastern enlargement which gained momentum after 1999 and the Stability and Association Process, which is formally supposed as the first step toward full membership, the EU forged more sound relations with the Balkan countries and replaced USA thereby becoming the most important foreign actor promoting peace and security in the region. The role of Greece, a EU member country situated in the Balkan region, underwent two phases, in one of them which Greece played the naughty boy paralysing the EU policies toward the region and on the other, the agent of stability for the EU. Probably, this drastic shift in the foreign policy of Greece to region had some understandable reasons ranging from the tendency to conceptualize the regional dynamics from different perspectives to relieve Greece from its former negative image and substitute it with a new looking ? the keystone in the stability of the region. Needless to say, Greece has reaped the benefits of this political reorientation in economic and political terms.