The Balkans in 2026 remain fragmented across EU members, candidates and third states, exposed to energy dependence, migratory pressure and external geopolitical pressure, and managed under an accession model that treats the region as periphery. Every existing inter Balkan scheme, the Berlin Process from 2014, the Open Balkan initiative from 2019, the South East European Cooperation Process, is intergovernmental. Each runs exclusively between governments, depends on electoral cycles, and is frozen the moment a nationalist government casts a veto. Bulgaria and North Macedonia from 2020 to 2022 on accession; Greece and North Macedonia from 1991 to 2018 on the name, until the Prespa Agreement of 17 June 2018. The peoples of the Balkans have no institutional voice. They have only the voices of their governments.
This is the foundational distinction Pillar 13 turns on. A union of states means the seats belong to governments, as in the Council of the EU, in NATO, and in every existing Balkan scheme. A union of peoples means the seats belong to directly elected representatives of populations. This is exactly what Rigas proposed in the New Political Constitution: the citizen is not defined by ethnic descent, nor by the sultan or king who rules, but by being a person who lives on the land, with equal rights. In practice a Vlach shepherd in the Pindos, a Greek citizen of the Muslim minority in Komotini, a Roma family in Sofia and an Albanian student in Tirana would each be one citizen with one vote in the Balkan Assembly, without the filter of a national government; the residents of the European municipalities of Turkey, a Turkish baker in Edirne among them, would hold observer voice in the first phase. Representation runs by population and region, not by state, so a Thessaloniki voter shares a regional logic with a Plovdiv voter more than with Athens. Minorities, Pomaks, Vlachs, Aromanians, Roma, the Muslim minority of Thrace, Sephardim, Gagauz, gain a direct voice without a national government deciding what they are allowed to say. And no nationalist government, Greek, Serbian or Bulgarian, can veto the scheme, because the scheme does not pass through governments.
A word on architecture. The eight AURIO Principles are vertical values, the rules the party holds to apply everywhere: Food, Energy, Economy, Democracy, Education, Culture, Openness and Governance. The Pillars are horizontal policy fields, where and how those rules are applied. Pillar 13 stands mainly on Principle 4 (Democracy, Bookchin and Castoriadis) and Principle 7 (Openness, Sen, Fanon, Grotius, Palme and Koskenniemi), and applies their logic to Balkan geography. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism scales from the municipal assembly upward, to the regional, the national and the Balkan. Castoriadis and Poulantzas supply autonomy as the creation of institutions and the state as the condensation of social relations. The Balkan Assembly is therefore the natural continuation of Principle 4 and of Principle 5, the pedagogy of the people, not an appendix to foreign policy.
Rigas included the Turks by name as equal citizens of his democracy, and AURIO keeps that distinction intact. The Turkish state, under its present structure, exercises aggression in the Aegean and in Thrace and instrumentalises refugee flows at the Evros, and cannot join the Democratic Balkan Union as a full member; Pillar 8, European Sovereignty and Foreign Policy, places the Greek state against that aggression without concession, on the principle of consistency with international law. But the peoples of European Turkey, the provinces of Edirne, Kırklareli and Tekirdağ and European Istanbul, around twelve million residents, belong to the Balkans geographically, ecologically and historically. The Evros is a shared ecosystem, the Ottoman and Byzantine heritage is common, and the municipal twinnings already work. They are granted observer status from the first day, with the right to speak and full participation in the Social and Ecological Council, through direct municipal representation and not through Ankara. Full membership follows when European Turkey meets the same criteria applied to all partners: minority rights per the Council of Europe, the rule of law, and press freedom. This is the answer of Rigas: we do not deny the Turks of Thrace their Balkan identity because Ankara breaks international law. The distinction between state and people is precisely the lever.
The red lines are commitments, not caveats. The Union complements the EU, it does not replace it: it operates inside the European framework exactly as Nordic cooperation and the Visegrád group operate inside the EU, as regional reinforcement and not as an alternative. It is not a Greek centric project; Greece participates as an equal partner, not as a hegemon. It revives no irredentism and respects existing borders as inviolable. It does not conflate the Turkish state with the Turkish people, nor criticism of Ankara with the exclusion of the Turks of Thrace from the Balkan family table. And it is neither anti NATO nor anti Western; it is for the regional solidarity that the international structures Greece already belongs to do not currently supply.
The Union does not begin with a grand treaty. It begins where Pillar 6 already places it, on the Evros, where the border region turns from a strategic margin into a hub of the Union and Proposal 8, the Evros and Edirne Cross Border Citizens Forum, becomes the pilot cell. From there the architecture grows: the Balkan Assembly on the European Parliament model, the Social and Ecological Council for shared rivers and grids, the Convergence Fund for the regions every capital treats as periphery, the common Erasmus, and the diplomacy of citizens in the languages of the region. The instruments, the Madrid Convention, the existing twinnings, the European Parliament template, are already in place. What is missing is the decision to build a Balkan layer that belongs to its peoples.
The Balkans do not need another summit of governments. They need a parliament of their peoples.