Brčko: Freight crosses the Sava here under a customs regime that Bosnia and Herzegovina agreed to modernise in exchange for European money, and the modernisation has not happened. That failure now carries a price. Bosnia stands to forfeit close to 374 million euros of its 1.1 billion euro allocation under the Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, according to figures circulating among officials who track the facility, and it has yet to draw a single payment.
The Growth Plan runs six billion euros through 2027, split roughly between grants and concessional loans, and pays only against reforms delivered. The Reform and Growth Facility ties each disbursement to steps a government wrote into its own reform agenda. Brussels designed that conditionality deliberately, borrowing the logic from the post-pandemic recovery fund. Governments that perform get paid twice a year. Governments that do not, wait.
The waiting has become permanent for some. A grace period covering the first payment request expired on 30 June, closing the window on reforms due between mid-2024 and mid-2025. Bosnia lost more than 100 million euros before that, simply because its institutions took until late 2025 to adopt a reform agenda the Commission could approve. Serbia, which received its first release in January, now has somewhere between 108 and 136 million euros at risk out of an allocation of 1.7 billion.
Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia meanwhile collected 158.9 million euros in May on their third request. The gap between the two groups is no longer a matter of speed. It reflects whether a state has a government that can legislate at all, and Bosnia’s layered constitutional settlement was never built to move a reform calendar written in Brussels.
The Commission has drawn the obvious conclusion. Reporting in early July indicated that officials intend to reallocate roughly 330 million euros from laggards to frontrunners, rewarding the states that met their milestones. Performance-based funding demands exactly that. Money parked against reforms nobody will deliver serves no one, and the facility closes in 2027 regardless.
Yet the redistribution exposes the flaw in treating accession finance as a performance contract. Enlargement policy exists to change countries that have not changed. Sending more money to Podgorica and Tirana, which were already moving, and less to Sarajevo, which was not, works as budget management and fails as strategy. It leaves the hardest case with the smallest incentive and the strongest argument that Europe has stopped trying.
Bosnian politicians who oppose central reform will read the reallocation as vindication. Their calculation has always been that blocking state-level capacity costs them nothing they value, and a facility that quietly withdraws funds confirms it. The leadership in Banja Luka has spent two years proving the point.
The Growth Plan was meant to show that accession delivers before membership arrives. In three of six cases it has. In Bosnia it has demonstrated something else, which is that conditionality only works on a partner who wants the reward more than the status quo. Brussels needs a different instrument for the ones who do not, and it has not drafted one.
