From the Stability Pact to the Regional Cooperation Council: how South-East European cooperation works
Students of the Balkans soon meet a cluster of acronyms that look alike and are easily confused: SEECP, RCC, the Stability Pact, the Berlin Process, CEFTA. They belong to the same story, the attempt since the mid-1990s to make the countries of South-East Europe talk to each other rather than only to Brussels or Washington. This article explains how the main pieces fit together, what the Regional Cooperation Council in Sarajevo actually does, and why its survey data are useful for anyone writing about the region.
1996: a process owned by the region
The South-East European Cooperation Process (SEECP) was launched by the foreign ministers of the region in Sofia in 1996, while the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had only just ended. Its founding idea was simple and, at the time, bold: the countries of the region would meet regularly on their own initiative, without an outside power chairing the table. The SEECP has no permanent organisation of its own. It works through a chairmanship that rotates among its participants every year, with meetings of foreign ministers and an annual summit of heads of state or government.
That modesty was deliberate. After a decade of wars, a forum that demanded nothing more than attendance could include governments that disagreed on almost everything else. The SEECP's lasting role has been political: it sets the general guidelines that later, more practical bodies follow.
1999: the Stability Pact, an outside initiative
The second piece came from outside. On 10 June 1999, the day the Kosovo war ended, the European Union, under the German presidency, launched the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe in Cologne. It brought together the countries of the region, EU member states, the United States, Russia, international organisations and financial institutions, and was described as the international community's first comprehensive conflict-prevention strategy for the region.
The Pact was not a fund or an organisation in the usual sense. It was a coordinating framework, led by a Special Coordinator and organised around three "working tables": democratisation and human rights, economic reconstruction and development, and security questions. Under its umbrella dozens of initiatives and task forces grew up, on trade liberalisation, energy, refugee return, the fight against organised crime, parliamentary cooperation and more. One of its most durable results was the network of bilateral free-trade agreements that was later consolidated into the enlarged CEFTA, the agreement first signed by the Visegrád countries in 1992.
By the mid-2000s the logic of an outside coordinator was wearing thin. Several countries of the region were in or close to the EU and NATO, and the governments wanted to own the process themselves. The working tables met for the last time in Tirana in December 2007, where the decision to create a successor body was confirmed.
2008: the Regional Cooperation Council
The Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) was officially launched at a meeting of SEECP foreign ministers in Sofia on 27 February 2008, as the successor of the Stability Pact. The arrangement joined the two earlier strands: the RCC is the operational arm of the SEECP and works within the political guidelines the SEECP sets, while it took over the coordination of the initiatives and task forces inherited from the Pact.
In practice, the RCC is a small international secretariat based in Sarajevo, with a liaison office in Brussels, headed by a Secretary General; at the time of writing the post is held by Amer Kapetanović. Its Board brings together 45 participants: the governments of the region, EU member states and institutions, other donor countries and international organisations. It is financed by the European Union, by the South-East European participants and by other Board members, and it works on the basis of its Statute and of three-year strategies and work programmes (RCC — Overview).
The choice of Sarajevo was itself a statement: a regional body headquartered in the city most associated with the wars of the 1990s, run by staff from across the region.
What the RCC actually does
The RCC has no power to impose anything. Its work consists of preparing regional agreements, monitoring whether they are implemented, convening experts and ministers, and producing data. A few examples show the range.
- Roaming. The Regional Roaming Agreement, signed in Belgrade in April 2019, was negotiated with the RCC and the European Commission as facilitators. Since 1 July 2021 mobile users from the six Western Balkan economies pay domestic prices when using their phones anywhere in the region, on the "roam like at home" model the EU applies internally (RCC — Free roaming in the Western Balkans). It is the RCC's most tangible result for ordinary citizens.
- The Common Regional Market. Endorsed by Western Balkan leaders at the Berlin Process summit in Sofia in November 2020, this action plan aims to extend the EU's four freedoms (goods, services, capital and people) across the region before accession. The RCC coordinates its implementation together with the CEFTA secretariat and reports on progress.
- The Green Agenda for the Western Balkans. Adopted at the same Sofia summit, it commits the region to align with the European Green Deal; the RCC runs an observatory that tracks implementation.
- Mobility and recognition. Agreements on travelling with identity cards and on recognising university diplomas and professional qualifications within the region are part of the same agenda; they matter directly to students and researchers who move between the region's universities.
Note the vocabulary. RCC documents speak of the "Western Balkans six" or "WB6" and of "economies" rather than "countries", a convention that allows Kosovo and Serbia to sit at the same table without either side conceding a point on status. The way these labels are built is explained in our article on what the regional names mean.
How it differs from neighbouring formats
The RCC is often confused with other regional bodies that grew up in the same period. A quick guide:
- The Central European Initiative, founded in 1989 with its secretariat in Trieste, covers a wider area from Central Europe to Ukraine and Moldova and works mainly by funding projects; see what the CEI is.
- The Visegrád Group is a cooperation of four EU member states, Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, with a fund but no secretariat.
- The Berlin Process, started by Germany in 2014, is a series of annual summits between the Western Balkan six and a group of EU member states; it gives political backing to initiatives such as the Common Regional Market, which the RCC then helps to implement.
- CEFTA is a trade agreement with its own secretariat in Brussels, not a political forum.
Academic mobility has its own regional scheme, CEEPUS, which is run by its member states and is not part of the RCC framework.
The Balkan Barometer: data for researchers
For students and researchers, the RCC's most useful output is probably the Balkan Barometer, an annual pair of surveys published since 2015. The Public Opinion survey asks citizens of the six Western Balkan economies about their living conditions, trust in institutions, the economy, corruption, migration, the EU and regional cooperation. The Business Opinion survey asks companies about the business climate, trade with the region, skills and regulation. In the first edition the public survey covered 7,000 respondents aged 18 and over and the business survey 200 companies in each economy; sample sizes and questions have evolved since, so check the methodology of the edition you use.
The data can be explored and downloaded on the RCC's site (Balkan Barometer), which makes the series a convenient source for theses and papers that need comparable figures across the region over a decade. Three precautions apply. Questions are sometimes reworded between years, so compare like with like. Results are survey estimates with margins of error, not census figures. And the RCC is a policy actor committed to regional cooperation and EU integration: its own reports naturally emphasise the findings that support that agenda, so read the tables rather than only the press releases.
Why it matters
The path from the SEECP to the Stability Pact and the RCC is a useful case study in its own right: a shift from cooperation imposed or sponsored from outside to cooperation managed by the region, with the EU still the main funder and the main destination. Results are uneven, and the hardest political disputes in the region lie outside the RCC's reach. But free roaming, mutual recognition of diplomas and a decade of comparable survey data are concrete outcomes, and they are often overlooked in accounts of the Balkans that focus only on conflict and enlargement deadlines.