Balkan peace still needs EU enlargement

For more than a decade, two documents have underpinned stability in the western Balkans: the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the 1999 UN Security Council resolution 1244, which ended Serbian control over the breakaway province of Kosovo while leaving its final status undetermined.

But last week (25 October), Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica accused the West of wanting to destroy both agreements by supporting independence for Kosovo and the abolition of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska. "This constitutes an open threat to the vital interests of the Serb nation," Koštunica said.

The response from Bosnia was not long in coming. "Koštunica would be better off minding his own business", Željko Komšic, the chairman of Bosnia’s three-member presidency, said the same day. He added that the Serbian prime minister should keep his hands off Bosnia "because he might get a rap on the wrist and nose". Just in case anyone might miss the point, he also told Koštunica not to forget "how his predecessor Miloševic ended up". Slobodan Miloševic was ousted in a popular revolt and died while on trial for war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

A spokesman for Koštunica’s party characterised Komšic’s statement as "primitive, cheeky and offensive".

The tussle was provoked by Miroslav Lajcák, the EU’s special envoy to Bosnia, who doubles as the high representative of the international community. Lajcák had responded to the ongoing policy paralysis with a package to simplify decision-making in the country’s central institutions and threatened to impose the measures if they were not passed by parliament.

The contretemps not only reveals the continuing rift between Bosnia’s largest ethnic groups, Serbs and Muslims, who cannot agree on what sort of state they want. It also suggests that the only strategy the West has had for the region following a decade of wars is coming to its limits - the idea that the prospect of closer ties with the EU would compel domestic reform. In Bosnia as well as Serbia, the strength of the gravitational pull of EU accession is now being tested.

Both countries are technically ready to sign pre-accession agreements with the EU but are unable to take the last remaining political hurdle. In Bosnia, this is police reform, which would put the country’s Serb police under central government oversight. In Serbia, it is full and unconditional co-operation with the ICTY which is still not forthcoming, according to Carla Del Ponte, the chief war-crimes prosecutor.

Dušan Reljic, a Balkan expert at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, a German think-tank, acknowledges that Bosnia’s problems are homemade but cautions against resting the analysis there. He says that the EU needs to give the countries of the western Balkans a clear deadline - he suggests 2014 - by which they will be admitted if they fulfil all technical and political criteria. Such a perspective has been missing so far, Reljic says, and doubts about whether the EU is genuinely committed to enlargement have weakened the pull of Brussels.

What mainly prompted Lajcák’s measures was the failure by politicians to agree a reform of Bosnia’s police. It was only after a protracted period of cajoling that Bosnia’s main parties last weekend (28 October) passed a declaration accepting the EU’s parameters for police reform. The declaration was welcomed by the European Commission as evidence of a new "spirit of consensus" but is short of specifics, which could yet derail the process just as it has done in the past.

The declaration came just two days before a meeting of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC), the international consortium of some 55 governments and organisations which oversees the Bosnia peace process. But regardless of the future of police reform, Lajcák’s package has prompted the worst rhetoric since the 1992-95 war and a very real threat by Bosnian Serb politicians, supported by Belgrade, to walk out of the central institutions if the measures are pushed through. Russia, which sits on the PIC, has also publicly repudiated Lajcák’s proposals. If the Bosnian Serbs make good on their threat of a boycott, the EU would face the strongest challenge yet to its project of bringing stability to south-east Europe by holding out the prospect of enlargement.

For more than a decade, two documents have underpinned stability in the western Balkans: the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the 1999 UN Security Council resolution 1244, which ended Serbian control over the breakaway province of Kosovo while leaving its final status undetermined.