EUROPE

Autumn 2005

by Ivan Krastev

The Balkans may have slipped off the radar screen of European public concern, but an explosive mix of unresolved problems is now in danger of going critical. Ivan Krastev, Research Director of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, explains why a new Balkans crisis is needed to get EU policymaking back on track.

Commentary:

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What makes the coming crisis in the Balkans really dangerous is that the European public is not prepared for it. And what makes it really important is that this is also a crisis that the EU badly needs.

It is in the Balkans that the EU must demonstrate it has the power to bring about the transformation of states that are weak and societies that are divided. Unless the EU has the capacity to bring security and development, it risks losing credibility in international politics. It is in the Balkans that the real referendum on the future of the EU will take place.

The outbreak of violence in Kosovo in March of last year failed to re-capture Europe’s attention. The international community trivialized the disruption, and compared to other nation-building projects like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans appeared to be a success story, so nobody wanted to read it as a horror story. Unfortunately, the border between failure and success is the least well guarded in this post-modern world, and diplomats make the worst border guards. We may hope that the wars in the Balkans are over, but the smell of violence lingers heavily in the air. The region’s profile is bleak - a mixture of weak states and international protectorates where Europe now has almost half of its deployable military forces. Economic growth in these territories is low or non-existent, unemployment is high, corruption is pervasive and people are pessimistic and distrustful of its nascent democratic institutions. Criminalization of politics in the Balkan states and statelets goes hand in hand with the internationalization of criminal networks.

The international community has invested enormous sums of money, goodwill and human resources in the Balkans. On a per capita basis, it has put 25 times more money and 50 times more troops into post-conflict Kosovo than into post-conflict Afghanistan. But despite the scale of the assistance effort in the Balkans, the international community has failed to offer civil society in the region a convincing political perspective. The future of Kosovo is undecided, the future of Macedonia is uncertain, and the future of Serbia is unclear. We run the real risk of an explosion in Kosovo, an implosion of Serbia and new fractures in the foundations of Bosnia and Macedonia.

The choice that the EU faces in the Balkans is enlargement or empire? Unless the EU devises a bold accession strategy to encompass all the Balkan countries as new members within the next decade, it will become mired as a neo-colonial power in places like Kosovo, Bosnia and even Macedonia. This would be an anachronism, difficult to manage and a contradiction of the very nature of the EU.

A picture of this kind of debilitating future is already to be seen in the quasi-protectorates of Kosovo and Bosnia. International representatives have no real stake in these areas, yet insist on quick results to complex problems. They dabble in social engineering, but are not held accountable when their policies go wrong. Bosnia has received the most democracy assistance per capita in the world, yet at the same time the Office of the EU’s High Representative - using the powers provided by the Dayton agreement – almost daily dismisses elected officials. Further entrenchment of Europe’s neo-colonial rule will encourage economic discontent. It will also become a political embarrassment for the whole European project and will, above all, be seen by European electorates as an immense but unnecessary financial and moral burden.

Balkan public opinion is in no mood to wait. The policy of constructive ambiguity - embodied in documents like UN Resolution 1244 for Kosovo or the Constitutional Charter of Serbia and Montenegro - that has been the basis for management of the region over the past six years, deserves some credit for dissipating tensions in the post-Milosevic Balkans. But this sort of constructive ambiguity now risks being transformed into a more destructive ambiguity. The consensus among Balkan observers is that the region is at breaking point, and that there is an urgent need for European action. The decision by the international community to move on with the status talks on Kosovo is evidence of this dangerous reality. While European governments are losing their courage to act, the people of the Balkans are losing their patience.

Clarifying the status issues is a pre-condition for bringing security and development to the region. The problem is that the status negotiations for Kosovo can only fuel the tensions and may even lead to tense violence if EU offers no real membership prospects to the present and future countries of the Western Balkans. Indecisiveness or vagueness by the EU could destroy everything it has achieved there in the past decade. The EU accession framework is the only working policy that Europe can apply to the Balkans. The alternative is to turn the European presence in the region into a reluctant colonial presence. Thus the real question must be is the European public ready to endorse imperial Europe if it is not ready to endorse enlarged Europe? My answer is “no”, and perhaps naively I believe that if there were to be another referendum in France on this, voters would choose an enlarged Europe rather than an imperial Europe.

The mid-year French and Dutch referendums are giving rise to a “new realism” in Europe, whose advocates say that rejection of the European constitution is the final verdict on EU expansion in the Balkans in the next decade. These newborn realists are convinced that enlargement should be put on hold to save the Union. In my view, the very opposite strategy is needed. Only dramatic and bold action in the Balkans can bring the EU back to its senses and out of its constitutional shock.

The vanishing prospect of EU enlargement into the Balkans could yet mean war there. And Javier Solana’s statement after the French referendum that the EU still stands behind its Thessaloniki commitment to bring the western Balkans into the Union clearly shows that Brussels understands the situation in the same way. The EU’s major challenge now is to communicate this reality to its citizens. History may yet hold in store an unexpected twist in which the Balkans is on the way to saving the EU before the EU saves the Balkans.