BRUSSELS: French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday ruled out any expansion of the European Union until the bloc is reformed, as a top EU official warned that the volatile Balkans could face a return to war if countries in the region have no hope of joining.

Macron’s insistence on a freeze came as the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, recommended that the world’s biggest trade bloc launch membership talks with Albania and Macedonia.

The Balkans spiraled into conflict in the 1990s as former Yugoslavia broke apart, but ethnic and nationalist tensions continue to simmer more than 20 years on.

The 28 EU member states must agree unanimously for any country to become a member. Accession to the bloc has been a powerful driver of political and democratic reform in countries like Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro which recently joined Nato Serbia and its former territory of Kosovo.

But with Britain set to become the first country to leave the bloc next year, Macron told EU lawmakers in Strasbourg, France that “I will only support an enlargement when there is first a deepening and a reform of our Europe.” “I don’t want a Balkans that turns toward Turkey or Russia, but I don’t want a Europe that, functioning with difficulty at 28 and tomorrow as 27, would decide that we can continue to gallop off, to be tomorrow 30 or 32, with the same rules,” he said.

But European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, whose institution recommends whether countries should be allowed in, insisted that Europe’s door must remain open.

“If we remove from these countries, in this extremely complicated region, I should say tragically, a European perspective, we are going to live what we already went through in the 1990s,” Juncker said. “I don’t want a return to war in the Western Balkans.”

Published in Dawn, April 18th, 2018