COMMENTARY

Spring 2010

by Hido Biscevic

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Heather Grabbe points rightly to the complexity of relations between the EU and south eastern Europe, in particular with candidate and potential candidate countries. Last year saw both a winning over and a slipping away from these objectives; the EU was very much in the process of redefining its priorities and its future strategic course against the backdrop of the Lisbon treaty and its promised new institutional landscape. With the EU’s inward-looking preoccupations, and with the accession negotiations with Croatia having been blocked for most of the year, stagnation and slowdown inevitably affected national agendas right across the region. There were signs, too, of a re-nationalisation of policies that are meant to be increasingly shared, and that's because so many unresolved issues in the Balkans are either bi-lateral in nature or relate to status issues in different countries.

Yet in the comparatively short time since the EU’s last enlargement round, it has become clearer than ever that it is vitally important to ensure that candidate countries have a dual commitment to the EU agenda as well as to their national or regional concerns.

In just a political sense but also a social and even psychological one, the past year was marked by developments that shook the whole Balkan region. The impact of the economic and financial crisis was felt at precisely the time when the region was at the peak of its post-conflict recovery.

Despite all the setbacks, Balkan countries have continued with their reform programmes, albeit to different degrees. This was generally recognised in the latest Communication of the European Commission on enlargement, with visa liberalisations for some of the western Balkans countries further strengthening their membership prospects.

But no one would deny that major issues concerning western Balkan countries’ accession are still on the table, and that they even exert a geopolitical influence of sorts. This makes it all the more important to see stability and regional cooperation there as strategically vital. An all-out effort must now be made to complete the enlargement process and ensure there is no strategic vacuum.

But, political leaders in the region also need to recognise their share of responsibility for dealing with and resolving the remaining issues. They need to uphold the present pace of reform and to enhance the rule of law. Above all, perhaps, they must genuinely embrace regional cooperation because it holds the key to economic integration and thus to their EU accession. Last but not least, they should pool resources in a new regional platform and in multilateral large-scale projects that can accelerate their economic development.

Now that the Lisbon treaty is in force, the EU’s efforts to play a more assertive global role will certainly hinge on its success or failure in creating a durable stability architecture in south east Europe. The western Balkans also has a clear historical responsibility for ensuring that it becomes an integral part of the European political economy, in other words part of the solution and not the problem.