Turkish Interests and Involvement in the Western Balkans: A Score-Card

159 T urkey’s increasingly assertive engagement in the Western Balkans leaves many people wondering about the purpose of such activism. Javier Solana, the former EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy (1999–2009), emphasized in a recent article for the Serbian daily Danas the need for cooperation between the EU and Turkey in order to achieve a permanent solution in Bosnia and Herzegovina.1 It is telling that he considered it necessary to state the obvious—that Turkey has leverage and increasingly has capacities in the Western Balkans and that the EU has to recognize this. Some participants at a conference devoted to Turkey’s Western Balkan policies, organized by the International Security Affairs Centre (ISAC Fund) on April 8, 2011 in Belgrade, insisted that Turkey understands far better the intricacies of the region’s problems than the Turkish Interests and Involvement in the Western Balkans: A Score-Card