EUROPEAN integration is still the central strategic goal of all Western Balkan countries. But Europe’s crisis has changed the political landscape. Until its onset several things were clear. For members of the European Union the point of bringing in the former Yugoslavs and Albania was to stabilise the region while for the Balkan countries the idea was to use the process to build modern and functional states. Now all bets are off. No one knows what the future holds because no one knows what the EU will look like in a year’s time let alone ten.
Vesna Pusić, Croatia’s foreign minister, says that when her country joins the EU in July next year it will have taken 12 years and four months of hard work to get there since the formal beginning of the process and that the EU that Croatia will join is not the same as it thought it was joining at the beginning. Behind Croatia, the remaining countries, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania and Bosnia are all at various stages along the path, but it will be years before the most advanced of them, currently Montenegro, will be ready to join.
All this, and what it means, is discussed in an excellent paper by Dimitar Bechev, of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The euro crisis has not killed enlargement but it is relegating the region to the outermost circle in a multi-speed Europe – the periphery of the periphery.” In the past he says, “in good times, the European core exported its prosperity towards its south-eastern periphery; but now, at a time of crisis, it is exporting instability.”
Balkan economies are now so thoroughly integrated into the euro zone, that this is hardly surprising, though the ways they are integrated varies. The vast bulk of their exports go to the euro zone and there are also remittances, especially important for Albania and Kosovo. Almost all the indicators point downwards though and there appears to be no room for optimism on the horizon. Indeed, as Mr Bechev points out, “for all practical purposes, the Balkans are already part of the EU.”
As a result he argues “stagnation and rising levels of joblessness, especially among the young, wipe out support for the kind of reformist parties Brussels likes to talk about. Balkan voters are not turning against Europe per se, but they are less likely to take its promise for a bright future at face value.”
Likewise current member states are more suspicious than ever about how much countries have reformed. Indeed, whereas in the past, annual progress reports from the European Commission were taken as the gold standard of measurement now certain countries, especially Germany, have started to do their own checks. They are suspicious of the reports prepared by the Directorate General for Enlargement, because they believe that it is not neutral in the process as it has a vested interest in keeping the whole enlargement show on the road because otherwise it would have nothing to do.
The Greek effect is also changing things. “In the Balkans, Europeanisation held out the promise of modernisation and convergence with the rich and well-governed countries of “old Europe” says Mr Bechev:
“But the unfolding Greek drama deals a serious blow to this convergence narrative. Greece was one of the region’s models: a quintessentially Balkan country that had made the grade from rags to riches, from underdevelopment and marginality to prosperity under the star-studded EU flag….Now, however, Greece is a warning about the perils of Europeanisation without deeper transformation.”
The tragedy is that the wars and disruption of the last two decades mean that by the time the Western Balkan countries are ready to join, it may be far too late. Timothy Garton Ash, the British historian and commentator, writing in Foreign Affairs,goes as far as to predict that, in the future, the EU may only survive: “as an origami palace of treaties and institutions,” which “will gradually decline in efficacy and real significance, like the Holy Roman Empire of yore.”
Mr Garton Ash could well be wrong however, and so for now the Balkan countries have not much choice but to continue working towards membership, even though they have no idea what sort of EU will exist when they are ready for it. But, as Mr Bechev correctly argues, they need to be encouraged to do this with the EU reinvigorating its approach, (he gives a number of suggestions about how it should do this,) saying that “the EU can still be the solution, rather than the problem…but only if it does not drop enlargement from its political agenda.”
(The Economist)
