In the spring of 1999, NATO aircraft bombed Serbian military and infrastructure targets for 78 days to end the war in Kosovo, a southern province of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia whose Albanian-majority population had endured years of repression. The bombing stopped. Kosovo became a UN protectorate. In 2008, it declared independence, recognising itself as a state that most Western countries recognised and Serbia never would. Twenty-seven years later, the two neighbours are closer to EU membership than they have ever been — and further from resolving the dispute between them than at almost any point in the past two decades.
The legal and political architecture
Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008 was upheld as consistent with international law by the International Court of Justice in 2010. It has since been recognised by 99 UN member states, including the United States and most EU members. Five EU member states — Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia — do not recognise it, for domestic political reasons related to their own territorial or minority issues. Serbia, which views Kosovo as an integral part of its sovereign territory, has led an active diplomatic campaign to limit recognition and to block Kosovo’s membership of international organisations. Kosovo is not a UN member, primarily because Russia and China block its membership in the Security Council.
The EU mediation: a decade of dialogue
The EU-facilitated dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, running since 2011, has produced two significant agreements — the Brussels Agreement of 2013 and the Ohrid Basic Agreement of 2023 — and an extensive catalogue of implementation failures. The Brussels Agreement committed Serbia to integrating Serb-majority municipalities in northern Kosovo into the Kosovo legal framework through an Association of Serb-majority Municipalities. Thirteen years later, the Association has not been established, and implementation of the Ohrid agreement has been similarly halting.
Both sides have legitimate grievances about the other’s implementation record, and both have used domestic political constraints as reasons — and occasionally excuses — for delays. Serbia’s government faces a population that is deeply resistant to any formulation that implies recognition of Kosovo’s independence. Kosovo’s government faces a population that is deeply resistant to any institutional arrangement that appears to give Serbia leverage over Kosovo’s internal affairs.
The EU accession dynamic
Both Serbia and Kosovo want EU membership. The EU has made normalisation of relations a prerequisite for progress. This gives Brussels theoretical leverage — but the leverage requires political will in both capitals that has consistently fallen short of what resolution requires. Serbia’s reluctance to align with EU sanctions on Russia, as explored in our enlargement status analysis, has added another complicating factor that makes Brussels less willing to offer the kind of political incentives that might soften Belgrade’s position on Kosovo.
The situation in northern Kosovo — where a Serb-majority population has largely refused to engage with Kosovo institutions, maintains parallel Serbian state structures, and where armed incidents have occurred periodically — remains the most physically dangerous element of the dispute. NATO’s KFOR peacekeeping force maintains a presence that prevents escalation. But prevention of the worst is not resolution, and resolution requires political decisions that neither Belgrade nor Pristina appears ready to make.
