After more than a decade of dialogue mediated by the European Union, relations between Kosovo and Serbia face a political paradox: the dialogue continues, agreements exist, and implementation mechanisms have been established, yet normalization remains distant. A process that began with the ambition of transforming relations between the two states appears gradually to have evolved into a mechanism for managing crises and preserving a fragile equilibrium. Instead of resolving the political conflict, what might be called an architecture of stagnation has emerged.
The Kosovo–Serbia dialogue appears to have entered a new phase in which the principal objective is no longer the achievement of a final agreement based on mutual recognition, but rather the management of successive crises on the ground. Following the 2023 Brussels Agreement and the Ohrid Implementation Annex, which were proclaimed a historic turning point, the process has become trapped in a vicious circle of accusations, state actions, and a lack of political readiness on both sides. This situation has transformed the dialogue from an instrument of resolution into a mechanism for managing the status quo.
The EU Special Representative for the Belgrade–Pristina Dialogue, Peter Sørensen, has repeatedly emphasized that responsibility for implementing the agreements rests directly with Pristina and Belgrade. In his official statements, Sørensen has stressed that the European path of both parties necessarily passes through the implementation of all agreements reached to date, without preconditions and without further delay. Nevertheless, despite this rhetoric from Brussels, the EU’s mechanisms for penalizing non-implementation or rewarding progress have lost much of their leverage over the parties.
The problem does not lie solely in the lack of political will in Pristina or Belgrade. It is also linked to the European model of mediation itself. For years, the EU has invested more in sustaining the process than in measuring its outcomes. Keeping the parties at the negotiating table has often been treated as an achievement in itself. As a result, the process has produced a considerable number of agreements, but also an increasingly visible gap between what has been agreed and what has actually been implemented.
Kosovar analysts and journalists view this EU approach as a form of defensive diplomacy. According to many commentators in Pristina, Brussels has adopted an asymmetric approach in which the process is more concerned with “putting out fires” in northern Kosovo than with resolving the underlying political dispute. Kosovar journalists argue that the imposition of restrictive measures on Kosovo, while comparable pressure on Serbia was absent following the Banjska attack, has damaged the EU’s credibility as an impartial mediator and reduced the direct utility of the process for the parties.
On the other hand, observers and journalists in Serbia assess that this new status quo largely suits the authorities in Belgrade. Serbian analysts argue that, for official Belgrade, freezing the process and focusing almost exclusively on the establishment of the Association/Community of Serb-Majority Municipalities serves as a means of postponing difficult decisions concerning Kosovo’s status. Journalists from independent Serbian media have also noted that Brussels tolerates Belgrade’s dual-track diplomacy because of geopolitical interests and the priority attached to regional stability, particularly in the context of the war in Ukraine.
This new status quo demonstrates that the dialogue lacks a clear end-state. As long as the EU continues to use the dialogue primarily as an instrument for preventing escalation on the ground rather than achieving a final settlement, Kosovo and Serbia will remain locked in an open-ended bureaucratic process in which European integration is more a distant promise than an imminent reality.
From Normalization to Crisis Management
The Kosovo–Serbia dialogue began with a pragmatic logic: technical issues would be resolved gradually, cooperation would build trust, and over time the process would move toward political normalization. The 2013 Brussels Agreement was the moment when this logic appeared to be producing concrete results.
Over the years, however, the opposite occurred. Technical issues became politicized, agreements were interpreted in conflicting ways, and implementation became selective. Increasingly, the dialogue was activated in response to crises: barricades, tensions in the north, the license-plate dispute, the withdrawal of Kosovo Serbs from Kosovo institutions, local elections, and security incidents.
The actual function of mediation therefore changed. Instead of dialogue producing normalization and normalization reducing crises, crises began to produce dialogue.
The 2023 Agreement: A Diplomatic High Point without Political Transformation
The Agreement on the Path to Normalisation of 27 February 2023 and the Ohrid Implementation Annex of 18 March 2023 were intended to represent the most significant turning point in the process since 2013. For the first time, a framework was formulated containing far more substantive elements of normalization: respect for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, recognition of documents and symbols, non-objection to Kosovo’s membership in international organizations, self-management for the Serb community, and the establishment of monitoring mechanisms.
The Ohrid Annex went further by providing that the parties’ obligations would become part of their respective European paths and that non-compliance could have consequences for European integration and financial assistance. On paper, therefore, the EU created a mechanism of conditionality.
In practice, the problem shifted from the absence of an agreement to the absence of implementation.
This is perhaps the most significant point in the entire process. Kosovo and Serbia no longer suffer from a lack of political documents. They suffer from the absence of a credible mechanism that makes non-implementation more costly than implementation.
The European Commission’s 2025 Kosovo Report states that the agreement is valid and legally binding on the parties, notwithstanding issues concerning its formalization. At the same time, the EU acknowledges that implementation remains problematic.
With regard to Kosovo, the EU continues to call for the launch of the process to establish the Association/Community of Serb-Majority Municipalities and for the implementation of obligations arising from Article 7.
With regard to Serbia, the European Commission has found that Serbia has undertaken actions contrary to the Agreement, including lobbying against Kosovo’s membership in international organizations. The EU has called on Serbia to begin implementing its obligations, including recognition of Kosovo’s documents, symbols, and institutions.
Article 6 of the Belgrade–Pristina Dialogue: Agreement on the Path to Normalisation between Kosovo and Serbia, together with the Ohrid Annex, assumes particular importance. Even if the Brussels–Ohrid Agreement were implemented in full, it would not constitute the end of the process. The text provides for the continuation of the dialogue toward a legally binding agreement on comprehensive normalization. It is precisely here that one of the principal sources of the new status quo in the Kosovo–Serbia dialogue can be identified. Article 6 sets no concrete deadline for reaching such a legally binding agreement, leaving the process open-ended and without a clearly defined endpoint. In this way, the dialogue risks being transformed from an instrument for achieving normalization into a mechanism for administering the status quo, in which the continuation of negotiations substitutes for their conclusion.
Asymmetry of Pressure and the Credibility Problem
One of the most significant criticisms of the European approach concerns the perceived asymmetry of pressure. Kosovo has frequently faced direct and measurable demands: de-escalation in the north, new elections, steps toward establishing the Association, and closer coordination with international partners.
De-escalation in northern Kosovo has become one of the most problematic aspects of the relationship between the Government of Kosovo and the European Union. From the perspective of Kosovo’s institutions, police actions in the north have been justified by the need to extend the rule of law, combat smuggling and organized crime, investigate the Banjska attack, and close illegal structures. The European Commission itself has noted that the Kosovo Police intensified efforts against smuggling and organized crime in the north. At the same time, the EU has consistently insisted on de-escalation, coordination with international partners, and avoidance of unilateral actions that, in its view, could heighten tensions, even linking the gradual lifting of measures against Kosovo to sustainable de-escalation in the north. This creates a political paradox: Kosovo interprets the consolidation of institutional authority and the pursuit of criminal groups as an exercise of sovereignty and the rule of law, while the EU, without denying the necessity of the rule of law, insists that the manner, timing, and modalities of such actions should not generate new tensions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the EU itself continues to call on Serbia to arrest and prosecute those responsible for the 2023 attacks in northern Kosovo, while assessing Belgrade’s actions in this regard as insufficient. Thus, “de-escalation” risks remaining a formula for crisis management unless it is accompanied by effective rule of law, criminal accountability for violence, and the dismantling of structures that undermine security, leaving the north in an intermediate condition between temporary stability and full institutional normalization.
Meanwhile, Serbia’s obligations have in some cases proved more difficult to operationalize politically and to sanction in practice.
This does not mean that Kosovo has no obligations. On the contrary, Kosovo’s international credibility requires it to implement the agreements it has undertaken, in accordance with its Constitution and legal order. But a normalization process cannot function if conditionality is perceived as selective.
Normalization requires reciprocity of accountability, not merely reciprocity of obligations on paper.
Banjska and the Limits of the Brussels Model
The attack in Banjska on 24 September 2023 should have marked a turning point in the way the EU conceptualized the dialogue. A process that for years had been approached primarily through the diplomacy of normalization was suddenly confronted with the security dimension in its most serious form.
The event demonstrated that the absence of normalization is not merely a diplomatic problem. It can produce concrete security consequences.
This is precisely where the limits of the European model become apparent: dialogue cannot substitute for accountability. When every crisis ends with a call for “the parties to return to dialogue,” there is a risk that the distinction between a political disagreement, a unilateral action, and a serious security incident becomes blurred within the same diplomatic formula.
From the Old Status Quo to the New Status Quo: What do Analysts Emphasize?
Before the dialogue, the status quo was characterized by an absence of institutional communication and an almost frozen political conflict. The new status quo is more complex. Today there are meetings, mediators, agreements, annexes, monitoring committees, declarations, and European mechanisms.
Yet the fundamental issues remain unresolved. Stagnation therefore does not mean an absence of activity. On the contrary, there is diplomatic activity without political transformation. This is perhaps the most paradoxical success of the current model: it has created a process functional enough to prevent a complete breakdown, but not powerful enough to bring about normalization.
Augustin Palokaj, one of the Kosovar journalists who has followed the dialogue from Brussels for more than a decade, has described this phenomenon through the concept of “destructive ambiguity.” In diplomacy, ambiguity can be constructive when it enables parties to compromise without immediately exposing themselves to domestic political costs. But it becomes destructive when the parties can interpret the same agreement in diametrically opposed ways. That is precisely what happened with the dialogue.
For Kosovo, the process was supposed to be a dialogue on the normalization of relations between two states.
For Serbia, it continued without acceptance of the fundamental premise of Kosovo’s statehood.
The EU, meanwhile, partly because five of its member states do not recognize Kosovo, chose not to resolve this contradiction but to manage it.
Palokaj has argued that this ambiguity has damaged the dialogue itself. He later took the criticism further, raising the question of whether, in practice, the EU has become more interested in preserving the status quo than in achieving full normalization.
This is precisely the central dilemma of the process: when the mediator invests more in the survival of the dialogue than in its outcome, the process begins to become an end in itself.
If Palokaj identifies the problem in the mediation model, Lulzim Peci places the issue in another dimension: the strategic cost that continuation of the status quo imposes on Kosovo.
Peci has argued that normalization with Serbia remains one of Kosovo’s principal challenges because it is directly linked to the country’s European and Euro-Atlantic prospects. In 2024, he regarded the Basic Agreement and the high-level dialogue as effectively blocked. This assessment highlights an element often lost in day-to-day political debate:
The status quo is not neutral for Kosovo.
Every year lost in a process without results is another year in which the relationship with Serbia continues to constrain Kosovo’s foreign policy, international integration, and full consolidation of its international subjectivity. Stagnation therefore carries a cost. And that cost is not necessarily distributed equally between the two parties.
Professor Enver Hasani, former President of the Constitutional Court, brings another dimension to the problem.
Hasani has treated the Brussels Agreement and the Ohrid Annex not merely as political documents, but as acts with legal consequences. In his interpretation, the absence of a formal signature does not necessarily eliminate the agreement’s legal weight. He has highlighted the EU’s presence and the existence of a clear point of reference and monitoring as elements that distinguish Ohrid from previous agreements.
But Hasani’s criticism goes considerably further.
He views the concept of “self-management” for the Serb community as potentially far more substantive than an ordinary mechanism of intermunicipal cooperation. In his interpretation, the model could have profound consequences for Kosovo’s constitutional organization and could create new power relations within the system.
One may agree or disagree with Hasani’s maximalist interpretation, but he raises a question that cannot be ignored:
Can the dialogue be treated simply as a foreign-policy process when its outcomes may alter Kosovo’s internal institutional architecture?
Palokaj, Peci, and Hasani do not view the process from the same perspective, nor do they necessarily reach the same conclusions. That is precisely what makes their comparison valuable.
Palokaj identifies the problem of mediation: ambiguity, the absence of a final objective, and the risk that the dialogue becomes an end in itself.
Peci identifies the strategic cost of stagnation: a Kosovo that does not resolve its relationship with Serbia remains constrained in its international and Euro-Atlantic advancement.
Hasani identifies the legal and constitutional cost: agreements reached through the dialogue may produce long-term consequences for the state’s internal organization and cannot simply be treated as temporary diplomatic compromises.
All three perspectives converge on one point: the status quo is not the absence of politics. It is itself a political outcome.
And this is precisely where the problem with the EU’s current model lies. After more than a decade, Brussels cannot measure success by the number of meetings, declarations, or agreements produced. The only relevant question is whether Kosovo–Serbia relations are today closer to final normalization than they were when the process began.
For Serbia, most of the obligations arising from the 2023 Agreement concern the way it conducts itself toward Kosovo at the bilateral and international levels.
For Kosovo, Article 7 may produce direct consequences for its internal institutional organization.
Implementation therefore cannot be reduced to the formula that “Kosovo must establish the Association.”
The issue is legally and constitutionally far more complex.
Dialogue as an Instrument of European Integration – But Where Is the Reward?
The EU’s initial idea was relatively clear: the more Kosovo and Serbia normalize their relations, the further they advance toward the European Union. This mechanism can work only if the European perspective is at once credible, tangible, and conditional.
When the reward appears too distant while the political cost of compromise is immediate, governments have less incentive to take difficult decisions. In this sense, the stagnation of the dialogue also reflects the weakening of the transformative power of the enlargement process itself.
The EU cannot demand historic compromises while offering only undefined prospects.
What Needs to Change?
Breaking out of the architecture of stagnation requires a change in the logic of the process. The EU must move from procedural mediation to implementation-based conditionality.
The obligations of each party should be clearly separated and accompanied by deadlines, indicators, and concrete consequences for non-compliance. Progress toward the EU and financial benefits should be tied to measurable results, not merely to participation in meetings.
At the same time, the dialogue must return to its ultimate objective. Temporary normalization of the situation in the north is not enough. Managing the next crisis is not enough. Nor is another agreement enough if it simply joins the archive of agreements that remain unimplemented.
The question should be much simpler: what final relationship between Kosovo and Serbia is this process intended to produce? The process should culminate in the signing of a Final, Legally Binding Agreement between the two states based on mutual recognition. From this perspective, an agreement that fails to resolve the issue of mutual recognition would leave the principal source of the dispute open and would continue to reproduce the same political uncertainty. Mutual recognition should therefore be the political destination of the dialogue, not the indefinite continuation of the dialogue itself.
Conclusion: When the Process Becomes an End in Itself
After more than a decade, the fundamental problem of the Kosovo–Serbia dialogue is not a lack of diplomacy. There has been diplomacy in abundance. The problem is that the process has gradually become institutionalized without producing the political transformation for which it was created.
The EU has succeeded in building an architecture that manages the dispute, absorbs crises, and brings the parties back to the negotiating table. Yet this very architecture risks becoming part of the problem: when management of the status quo functions well enough, the pressure to change it diminishes.
Brussels’s next challenge, therefore, is not to organize another meeting between Pristina and Belgrade. It is to restore the political cost of stagnation.
Because a dialogue that does not change reality, but merely administers it, is no longer an instrument of normalization.
It is the architecture of the new status quo.
Orhan Çeku. Associate professor for the subject of National Security at the public Haxhi Zeka University in the Republic of Kosovo
The articles published in the “Opinions” column reflect the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the position of the Center
