The Balkans and the European Union. The regatta sets sail

Date: 28/06/03

Battered Balkan countries are sailing towards “Europe” at different speeds

IN QUIET moments some Balkan politicians say they miss the old days of war and strife when western leaders paid them court and almost anything they said or did was flashed around the world by journalists who hung on their every word. No longer. When the leaders of Yugoslavia's successor states plus Albania gathered near the Greek city of Salonika last week to meet their European Union counterparts at the end of a grand EU summit, Britain's Tony Blair - among other leaders - did not even stay to welcome them.

Yet that may be a good sign. Leaders of the EU's countries now have worse problems to deal with elsewhere. War between the ex-Yugoslavs, who were tearing themselves apart less than a decade ago, is no longer in the offing. The countries that emerged out of Yugoslavia's rubble are starting to co-operate again. Serbs and Croats no longer need visas to visit each others' countries. By the end of the year fast trains should run between Serbia and Slovenia; you should also, after a 12-year gap, be able to fly directly between the Serbian and Croatian capitals. Most strikingly of all, all of ex-Yugoslavia is now heading, slowly but surely, towards “Europe”.

Indeed, once the EU's leaders had broadly agreed to the draft of a constitution for Europe, the only stirring declaration they had left to make was that the Western Balkans - meaning, in EU jargon, the six republics that once made up Yugoslavia, minus Slovenia but plus Albania - can all expect to join the EU, provided, of course, that they meet a mass of demanding conditions . The summit's Greek hosts were particularly keen on the Balkan declaration. They might one day become the leading country in a new EU zone.

The Balkan countries were given no dates for entry into the club. Eight central European newcomers, including ex-Yugoslav Slovenia, which plausibly claims to be no longer Balkan, plus Malta and Cyprus, are set to join next May. Bulgaria and Romania hope, rather optimistically, to be in by 2007. Turkey has no date in mind but would seek, even more optimistically, to join soon after. The EU catchphrase is the “regatta principle”, meaning that countries from now on will join when qualified, rather than in groups as before.

After Slovenia, Croatia is the strongest candidate among the ex-Yugoslavs and has already passed through various stages that allow it formally to apply to join. Macedonia has reached the second of those stages, the signature of a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU, but it is too poor and still too racked by ethnic tensions between its Slav majority and ethnic-Albanian minority to qualify for early entry. Albania has started negotiating an SAA but is also much too poor and messy for fast-track expectations.

Bosnia is now the area's laggard, though it has nearly completed an EU “feasibility study” that must precede SAA talks. Until it builds genuine cross-community government structures enabling its three groups - Serbs, Croats and Muslims - to co-operate without outsiders needing to hold the ring, it has no chance of joining the club in the foreseeable future; NATO still has 12,000 peacekeeping troops there.

Serbia needs a buoy

The region's key country, whose population of 8m is twice as big as any of the other bits of former Yugoslavia, is still Serbia - and the omens there are both good and bad. In recent months it has had more of its fair share of ups and downs. In March, its energetic, reforming prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated, probably by ultra-nationalists connected to the underworld. In the wake of his death the country has held together remarkably well. But it is not certain that its government can proceed as fast as it should, because of the links that some of its members themselves may have had, or still have, with organised crime.

Moreover, Serbia's relationship with Montenegro and Kosovo makes it even trickier for it to plot its path towards the EU. Its very loose union with Montenegro may change over the next few years. A clean break is marginally the likelier outcome. And the future status of UN-protected Kosovo is unclear.

Still, Serbia has, in some respects, been doing better. Since the fall in October 2000 of Slobodan Milosevic, its long-time strongman, one big headache has been demands by the UN's war-crimes tribunal in The Hague for co-operation. Earlier this month the government took a bold step when special police nabbed Colonel Veselin Sljivancanin, who had been indicted for the deaths of more than 200 Croats captured when the Serbs took the Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991. His arrest means that General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serbs' former army commander, is the only major alleged war criminal indicted by the court who is still at large, at least occasionally, in Serbia. Nationalists are furious, but the colonel's extradition means that American aid worth $110m should now flow in.

In any event, the effects of Mr Djindjic's assassination are by no means over. It convulsed the country. Arrests and investigations laid bare much of what many had suspected for years. Since some 45 people were charged with conspiracy to murder Mr Djindjic, it has become plain that they formed part of a whole web of interests, embracing organised-crime bosses, the secret police, a now disbanded special police unit known as the Red Berets, and people suspected of war crimes. In the words of a prominent investigative reporter, Dejan Anastasijevic, borrowing a phrase popularised during the war in Iraq, organised crime was “embedded” at the heart of Serbia's state institutions.

The country's well-being (and its progress towards the EU) much depends on how thoroughly the power of this mafia-like web has been weakened or broken since Mr Djindjic's death. In its aftermath, more than 10,000 people were arrested, of whom several hundred are still in prison. But many Serbs think that too many people close to the ruling coalition retain unsavoury links to organised crime. Some criminals are still protected by friends in the secret police with access to the files of people in government who have collaborated with them in the past. If that all came out, says Mr Anastasijevic, virtually the entire political establishment would collapse.

This week Serbia's deputy prime minister, Cedomir Jovanovic, told a hastily convened meeting of parliament's security and judicial committees that he had indeed had contacts - but in good faith - with one of the crime bosses implicated in Mr Djindjic's murder who has since died “resisting arrest”. Mr Djindjic's successor as prime minister, Zoran Zivkovic, has been mired in wrangling within his government. His ruling coalition is weak and divided. Reform has stalled. A general election is due by autumn next year but may have to be brought forward. Serbia's political climate is nasty.

Miroljub Labus, the popular leader of a reformist pressure group that has turned itself into a political party called G-17 Plus, says that a solid basis of economic reform was laid (by himself, among others) in the two years after Mr Milosevic was ousted. But most foreigners are still too nervous to invest. Mr Labus hopes that his party's demand for Serbia to break completely from Montenegro will win it votes. He also thinks, plausibly, that his party's stress on the economy should be popular. Many Serbs are desperate for jobs.

Serbia no longer menaces any of its neighbours. But it has a long way to go before it can be considered a normal, healthy country. It is some lengths behind its old rival, Croatia, in the regatta.