The media is mostly government-owned and manipulated. The Balkan region, put simply, is not European. It is Byzantine, Ottoman, Eastern, Orthodox. It belongs to Turkey and the Middle East, not to Frankfurt and Paris. It will never be successfully subsumed by the West.
Turkey offer the perfect example.
Turkey has been trying for decades now to get into the exclusive European club and has been consistently and perfunctorily rejected by the EU - and this despite the fact that Turkey is an important member of NATO and a country much more developed than the likes of Macedonia or Albania. As these unpleasant truths emerge, the bitterness, resentment and disillusionment will grow, and a backlash will develop. It was wrong of the EU to promise what it can never deliver and couch it in deceptively ear-soothing phrases. It will pay the price in added instability and ruin. The Euro-Atlantic structures are evolving, assuming ever more ambitious and comprehensive goals and growing ever more impressive antlers.