On Friday 9 December, just before the momentous European Summit in Brussels came to a close, Croatia signed its Accession Treaty. Croatia’s accession will finish in 2013 and it will finally be granted EU membership after eight years of hard graft on negotiations. Yet Croatian accession is actually coming much sooner than many predicted. The matinal conclusion to negotiations was reached in 2011 by the convincing work and parallel legal labour of a regional partnership: the Hungarian EU presidency and Croatian political players. The successful Croatian example reinvigorates an enlargement process that many commentators feared had stalled in the midst of the eurozone crisis and Serbia’s continued lack of candidature status.
Like much of the EU’s political scene in Brussels throughout 2011, the agenda at this December’s European Council was dominated by the new cycle of economic policy co-ordination and the EU’s external affairs. The latter have drawn on the EU’s southern neighbourhood approach and events in Libya. But as the EU’s prime ministers filed into the Consilium’s angular Justus Lipsius building, also present were the Croatian President Ivo Josipović, his wife Tatjana and Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, who had travelled to Brussels to sign Croatia’s EU membership Treaty.
Croatia’s negotiations for membership came to a close during the previous June European Council, and the tension was palpable. The deal on Croatia was not sealed ahead of the June Council and it was possible only to anticipate a potential statement in the Council’s conclusions that in the course of 2011 Croatia would be ready to close its negotiations for EU membership. Herman van Rompuy had previously told President Josipović that Croatia was indeed “almost there”. Even so, winning approval for the membership of a sole Western Balkan state amidst an agenda of wider troubles seemed challenging.
Winning the go-ahead for Croatia’s membership had indeed been very difficult for many to imagine. Scores of experienced EU enlargement officials thought that Croatia simply did not stand a chance this time round, and could only possibly conclude negotiations in 2012. It was as late as May and Croatia still had five chapters of the acquis communautaire to close. With France and Germany’s increasing anxiety about Bulgaria’s and Romania’s entry into the Schengen zone, it seemed that Paris and Berlin were planning to tarnish both issues with the same brush. There were also additional requests for a co-operation and verification mechanism to be established before Croatia’s entry to membership and further reforms in competition policy and local judiciary would have to be concluded. A mechanism would have to be in place to check on the progress of these chapters every six months. Yet before the clock struck 4pm on the final day of the June Council, it was decided that accession negotiations with Croatia would be concluded by the end of the month. Six months later, on 9 December, President Josipović and Prime Minister Kosor arrived in Brussels to sign Croatia’s membership treaty.
Croatia now awaits to hold a referendum on membership on 22 January. Croatia held its general elections on 4 December and a new government led by SDP leader Zoran Milanović will be formed before Christmas. The realistic timeframe to organise a proper information campaign on EU membership places the referendum in five weeks time at the end of January 2012.
Yet with the good comes the bad and the beginning of December also brought less auspicious enlargement news for the Western Balkans. In the same week as Croatia signed its treaty, Serbia failed to attain EU candidacy status. Despite Serbian President Boris Tadić’s demands and the expectations of others, Serbia was neither granted candidacy, nor were negotiations opened. After the conclusion of Croatia’s membership negotiations Serbia was quick to capture and deliver in July the last one of its most wanted war criminals, Goran Hadžić, to the ICTY in the Hague. Possibilities for Western Balkan integration suddenly seemed more promising, only to be hampered by the unrest that also began in July at the border between Serbia and Kosovo.
The enlargement process is determined by a group of actors (both within the candidate states, as well as at the EU level) and not governed by a constituency of one. Hardly akin to a high-speed train gliding along at 250kph with predictable smoothness, it is rather more like travelling in an older freight train, chugging along in forced pushes and pulls, often delayed and arriving at unscheduled times. As Croatia has succeeded in bringing such tough, drawn-out negotiations to a close, it could become a flagship nation for a region bogged down by enlargement fatigue and regional inconsistencies for the better part of the 2000s.
We should therefore ask what actually stood behind this unlikely Western Balkan finish. Many players from the EU side worked hard through accession negotiations, including the Council Secretariat and the Commission in the screening process. Croatia’s accession was the most significant objective of the Hungarian EU presidency, which began in January and ended in June 2011, and the presidency did its utmost to accelerate the drafting of the Treaty. Permanent Representative Peter Gyorkos was a captain who never lost sight of the horizon, believing fully that Croatia’s membership negotiations could be concluded in June – something which most in Brussels merely scoffed at. Hungary found in Croatia a motivated government whose conservative ruling party’s primary issue in the impending elections at the end of 2011 was successful EU membership.
Also important in establishing velocity were the Croatian President’s credentials of personal integrity and his 15 successful months in office. These credentials were indispensable in the final hours and seemed to convince those in the EU who needed convincing of the Hungarian cause. The European Council wanted to be convinced that president Josipović would continue a good relationship with Serbia and its president Tadić and in general would guarantee the continuation of the political progress made in Croatia. For those like the EPP Group in the European Parliament who were significant supporters of the membership and had come to Croatia’s bedside early, it was vital that Josipović worked well with Kosor and her government. For the Croatian accession, purposeful intent and working relationships across political divides genuinely mattered.
The negotiations over the accession’s political conditions took place in the Council’s working group on enlargement and at the final stage in the Committee of the Permanent Representatives (COREPER). But another working party of the Council, the Ad Hoc Working Party on the Drafting of the Accession Treaty, performed the significant background work to implement political decisions. Its task was to formulate the agreements reached during the accession negotiations in legal terminology. The drafting of the accession treaty itself by the party and the end negotiations take place simultaneously. The working party on treaty drafting was therefore established in December 2009, with its work taking place under the Spanish presidency (January-June 2010) and the Belgian presidency (July-December 2010).
For the signing of the Croatian Accession Treaty to take place before the end of the year, treaty drafting had to progress at a significant pace. The Hungarian prerogative was the accession of its neighbour and its strategy was to concentrate on accelerating and finalising the treaty drafting process in order to eliminate the delay that had been accumulated over previous years. A speedy finish for Croatia’s accession required two things: political agreement and legal language in the accession treaty, leading to a straightforward completion of the process.
The strategy was successful and drafting progressed rapidly under the Hungarian presidency, moving at full speed from January 2011. Treaty writing was wrapped up by September, as the final chapters concluded in June were incorporated and the consolidated version of the Treaty was accepted by the working party under the Polish presidency.
In the end the Hungarian presidency made possible what had seemed impossible. On June 30 the negotiations were closed and in parallel a considerable amount of the treaty text had been adopted, including the majority of the three main “pillars”: the Act of Accession/the Accession treaty, the Negotiated Measures and the remaining Technical Adaptations. As the working party finished its task in September, the English version of the Treaty could then be accepted by the COREPER. Checking and translation of the text by the lawyer-linguists into the 23 official languages of the EU was then able to start. As a result the consolidated, comprehensive text was ready for signature in December. The text was then sent to the member states, Croatia, the European Parliament and the Commission. Based on the consent of the European Parliament and the decision of the Council (TFEU article No. 49) which in turn is based on the opinion of the Commission, the signature of the Accession Treaty of Croatia was able to take place in December.
As a final step, member states will now ratify the Treaty according to the rules of their own constitution. This may take longer than in the past as the current economic situation across the eurozone is a concern to each EU capital from Dublin to Nicosia. Still, all things considered, Croatia is set to become the EU’s 28th member state in 2013.
Europe is often seen as having many leaders but little leadership. The bi-annual European Council Summits host many cooks around one boiling broth. The euro crisis has also induced fears of one country, or one leader, wielding too much influence. When Europe’s economy is in danger, anxiety levels over a lack of assertive decision-making and single states dominating the European political and financial space increase, and could easily boil over.
Yet, politics can be the art of making possible that which seems impossible. The conclusion of Croatia’s membership negotiations earlier than expected in June shows the advantage of vision and also demonstrates that the EU’s work in political decision-making is significantly interdependent on the work of civil servants on each side: the Council, the Presidency and the candidate state. Good strategy and tenacity are paramount and the EU presidency can still act as a driving force behind a chosen singular measure. This is all underlined by decisive and measured leadership in the candidate country to overcome economic and political problems of concern. Although the euro crisis spells financial difficulties for 2012 and perhaps recession in France and Italy, enlargement is still one of the key measures by which the EU continues to redefine itself. Decisive action and efficient service are not often cited as attributes of the EU, but this June’s unlikely Balkan success story shows another dynamic side to EU enlargement.
Rinna Elina Kullaa is an Associate Professor of Contemporary European History and International Relations at the University of Jyväskylä and a Research Associate at the Network for European Studies, University of Helsinki. Boglárka Bólya served as the Chair of the Council Working Party on the Drafting of the Accession Treaty with Croatia from January-July 2011. She is an Adviser in the Legal Affairs Committee of the EPP Group in the European Parliament.