Heiko Maass (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, pool)
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas stated ahead of Serbian Foreign Minister Nikola Selakovic’s visit to Berlin on March 3 and 4, that the united Europe does not end at the EU’s external borders and that Europe’s strategic sovereignty is unthinkable without close ties to the Western Balkans.
For this reason, during the next two weeks Maas will meet with Selakovic and the foreign ministers of Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Olta Xhacka and Bisera Turkovic, respectively, while the foreign affairs state secretary, Michael Roth, will travel to Podgorica, according to a March 2 press release from the German Foreign Ministry. The release also said that Roth will thus follow up on the visit of the new Montenegrin foreign minister, Djordje Radulovic, to Berlin in early January.
The announcement adds that “Germany is serious when it comes to the EU perspective of all Western Balkans countries” and that because of that “it is important to continue to work intensively on this path on the basis of reforms and to support it.”
The German ministry also recalls that since 2014 there has been an important complementary format for this in the form of the Berlin Process for rapprochement between the Western Balkans and the EU. It also adds that the German promise that the future of the Western Balkans lies in the European Union remains.
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