Fifteen years of failure in the Balkans

The main reason for the creation of an EU foreign and security policy was the ineptitude of the Union in the face of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia into messy conflicts. To be precise, it was the overwhelming reality of the EU’s manifest failure to deal coherently with the Balkans as a challenge to its own interests, on its own continent. Fifteen years later, both the Balkans and the EU failure appear to be proceeding along their original trajectories.

Unfortunately, the prize is more of the same - and worse. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, this already appears to be the case, with a major crisis over police reform, and in Kosovo the issue of independence looks far from being able to be resolved by the 10 December deadline.

While the two issues appear to be separate, they stem from the core problem that originally set fire to the region: the unwillingness of the different ethnicities, especially the Serbs, to live together with any other ethnic group - or to be ruled by another. All the wars that emanated from this basic confrontation and the agreements and arrangements that have been devised in response to them have at best contained this issue. But until it is properly resolved there can be no hope for any proper advancement, regardless of any framework or deadline.

Conventional wisdom on the region has in past years usually been optimistic, owing to the Dayton accords and EU enlargement, which appeared to be ‘progressing’. Since Dayton is basically a cease-fire agreement, it can be deemed an unqualified success given that the opposing sides in Bosnia have not gone back to war - but it has nowhere else to progress. The only real progress on Dayton would be for it to be replaced by a peace agreement between the sides that resolved their political differences, which has not been the case.

The situation is not much better with regard to enlargement. It is impossible to measure progress in this process if the political framework of the candidates is endemically unclear, as is the case with both Bosnia and Kosovo. Apparently aware of this basic hurdle and either unwilling or incapable of resolving it, the EU has chosen to follow a parallel universe of arrangements and deadlines largely imposed by the US. So it was decided last year that the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia would be closed by June and that the state would transit into self-rule - except that the state was not ready and Christian Schwarz-Schilling, the man chosen to be the final high representative, was unsuited for the job. The current incumbent is therefore a stop gap while arrangements are reconsidered - and in the interim the three ethnic groups in Bosnia have reverted to extreme rhetoric not heard since the end of the war in 1995, making the state an even less viable candidate for EU membership.

In Kosovo the December deadline looms, not least because the June deadline failed. And that is because there has been no progress since the NATO bombings of 1999 on the core issue of either reconciling Kosovo’s Albanian majority with the province’s Serb minority and with Serbia, or finding a durable separation agreement that recognises the rights of both. The idea of internationally imposed conditional independence currently on the table does not resolve the problem and creates a dangerous international precedent of promoting self-determination over territorial integrity and state sovereignty. Aware of this, several EU member states have indicated that they would not support any unagreed move to independence, while others have said that they would recognise Kosovo if it declared unilateral independence. In the meantime preparations continue for a mission to replace the current UN administration - as if all were proceeding according to plan rather than deteriorating further into a dangerous mess.

11 December could mark the start of the next phase of disaster in EU foreign policy in the Balkans - unless some drastic measures are taken rapidly. In Bosnia these must focus on proper political negotiations between the sides to replace all international interim arrangements. In Kosovo imposed independence must be replaced by negotiated partition as a proposed solution. Above all, the EU must appear united and determined on both outcomes if there is not to be another Balkan war.

• Ilana Bet-El is an academic, author and policy adviser based in Brussels.

The main reason for the creation of an EU foreign and security policy was the ineptitude of the Union in the face of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia into messy conflicts. To be precise, it was the overwhelming reality of the EU’s manifest failure to deal coherently with the Balkans as a challenge to its own interests, on its own continent. Fifteen years later, both the Balkans and the EU failure appear to be proceeding along their original trajectories.