Can the Balkans fend for themselves?

Next February, the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe will be replaced by a newly established Regional Co-operation Council (RCC).

The move from Brussels to Sarajevo, where the new organisation will have its headquarters, and the replacement of Erhard Busek of Austria with Croatian diplomat Hido Bišcevic is of more than symbolic importance: it signals that the Western Balkans has left the phase where international involvement was critical to its stability.

But has it really? Does the move from pact to council reflect real progress on the ground - or just fashionable notions of ‘local ownership’?

The stability pact was adopted on the very day - 10 June 1999 - that NATO suspended its air campaign against Serbia. It was launched with great fanfare at a summit in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on 30 July of that year. In his recent memoirs, the then-foreign minister of Germany, Joschka Fischer, wrote that the stability pact was established on the model of the Marshall Plan and that it had been "thought up and developed" by Germany, making 30 July 1999 "a great day for German diplomacy".

The pact’s website describes it as "the first serious attempt by the international community to replace the previous, reactive crisis intervention policy in south-eastern Europe with a comprehensive, long-term conflict prevention strategy".

Measured against such expectations, talked up with great gusto by the pact’s first co-ordinator, Bodo Hombach of Germany, the whole endeavour has been a great disappointment. The stability pact, which has no legal standing of its own, has had little money (serving mostly as a conduit for funds already pledged) and little strategic impact on the region. But as stability pact officials readily admit today, such expectations were highly unrealistic to begin with, and the pact has in fact made a - modest - contribution to stability in the region. Among the most important of these has been its role as a forum for governments to talk at a time when the regional climate was marked by mutual distrust.

The pact’s work also contributed to the creation of an integrated energy market in the Balkans and common strategies to combat graft, organised crime and illegal migration.

Bišcevic, the incoming head of the RCC, conceded in an interview that the pact was widely seen as invented and imposed by outsiders. Brave and bold steps were now needed, he said, to make up for time lost - especially in the light of pressing problems, foremost among them the unresolved status of Kosovo and the deepening crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina. "There is no room for failure," he said, adding that the RCC would not be a waiting room or a substitute for full eventual EU membership of the countries of the western Balkans. Rather, the membership prospect is of crucial importance if the RCC’s approach is to work.

Kosovo and Bosnia have both been wards of the international community for years. But from the very beginning, the intrusive international presence which was established in Bosnia following the Dayton peace accords of November 1995 made outsiders, and indeed some on the inside as well, uneasy about its paternalistic implications. In Kosovo, a similar situation - though with different institutional arrangements - developed after the Serbian province was put under UN administration on the day the stability pact was set up.

Critics complained that the presence of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, which in 1997 was given the ‘Bonn powers’ to dismiss elected officials and impose or revoke legislation, was undermining local democracy and gave politicians a cover behind which to hide.

Over the past few years, outright supervision has gradually been replaced by conditionality tied to the prospect of eventual EU accession. But in Bosnia and Serbia, the policy of conditionality is now pushing up against its limits and has failed to produce outcomes needed for the two countries to forge closer ties with Brussels, while the status question of Kosovo appears as intractable as it was in 1999.

The timing for the phasing of the stability pact into the regional co-operation council suggests two things: that neither the stability pact nor its successor organisation is seen as sufficiently political to warrant any delay in view of the deepening crisis in Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia, and that the transfer is not premised on tangible progress on the ground.

Next February, the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe will be replaced by a newly established Regional Co-operation Council (RCC).