Bloomberg Politics: Bulgaria Pushes for Clearer EU Membership Path for Western Balkans

The European Union's poorest member is seeking to offer a clearer path toward membership for the western Balkans to prevent a return to the instability that ravaged the continent's most volatile region two decades ago.

Bulgaria, which will assume the EU's six-month rotating presidency in January, is pushing for the world's biggest trading bloc to offer more concrete guidance on how Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina can join its ranks, Liliana Pavlova, Bulgaria's minister in charge of the EU presidency, said last week.

While two countries that were once part of the former Yugoslavia are now part of the 28-member EU, most of the rest are struggling to integrate and join the wave of rising living standards in ex-communist Europe. Following a decade that included the Greek debt catastrophe, the arrival of millions of refugees and Brexit, Bulgaria plans to shift the discussion from crisis management to enlargement as it prepares to preside over a bloc-wide summit in May.

"We can't change Europe's agenda in six months, but we should be able to give to each of these countries a clear action plan based on their achievements and progress in resolving their problems," Pavlova said. "Otherwise the rifts between the regions would deepen."

Integration Struggles

Nearly two decades after Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II ended in the Balkans, the ex-communist region's only countries to achieve EU entry have been Slovenia, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria. The latter two remain the poorest in the bloc and have been criticized for failing to tackle corruption and improve the judiciary. The shortcomings have impeded entry into the bloc's border-free Schengen area.

In the rest of the western Balkans,...