International Conference: Current Security Challenges for the Western Balkan Region Addressed by Means of Joint Responsibility and Cooperation 104 From 1995 to date this country remains hardly functional due to the aws in the institutional design of the DPA. The DPA strengthened ethno­territorial autonomy at the expense of the weak central institutions and created a highly interventionist international presence reluctant to implement integrationist elements of the DPA from the outset. The lack of political process has immobilized cooperative tendencies in local politics. Kosovo's political system has been a creation of international diplomats in charge of its administration. Thus, international concerns dominated the choices for Kosovo's institutional evolution. The evolution of Kosovo's institutional design and features reect international actors desire to avoid a possible regime change in Serbia after 2000, repartition and change of borders, resumption of large scale conict in the region, and also reect, in particular, a worry about the Serbian and Russian response to Kosovo's evolution towards full, independent statehood. In this regard, external concerns over Belgrade's stability had as much weight as the concerns about the stability of Kosovo. Whereas the DPA was meant to halt the conict within the BiH, it effectively became an obstacle in the EU integration of this country because the EU criteria required more integrationist institutional set up which was practically impossible due to the DPA provisions. In Kosovo, after the declaration of independence, the EU required the accomplishment of internal criteria, but the most relevant issue remained dialogue with Belgrade, which effectively overshadowed all other criteria, which to this date remain far from being fullled. In this sense, the EU is viewed as a power which forces Kosovo to accept solutions against its own interest, rather than as a perspective which could create long-term peace and economic prosperity to the country. So far, this discussion paper has argued that BiH and Kosovo fragility is caused in the large part by inconsistencies of peace-building policies by the international community. Therefore, the delay in their path to EU integration is paradoxical: the EU requires them to change what it forces them to approve on one hand, and on the other, especially in the case of Kosovo, it creates fragility through own dialogue which results in weak institutional set up dependent upon good will from Belgrade as a regional power which opposes Kosovo's institutional development. In conclusion, this discussion paper contends that the EU integration for the most affected societies of the former Yugoslavia has not only delayed, it has rather stalled due to inadequate international approach to reconstruction which has created fragile states that have not been capable of grasping with the challenges of transition efciently. Secondly, these societies are forced to change the systems and policies which they were forced to accept as a condition for the EU integration. This has created a number of security challenges ranging from institutional instability to the risks of global security, the most dangerous of which is political Islam, which has directly affected these societies as a consequence of the lack of any other perspective for political, economic and social change, embedded in the perspective for European integration. Otherwise, they are trapped in the closed circuit from which there seems to be no way out unless a true European integration perspective is opened.