Reforms slacken in would-be EU states

Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for enlargement, will present a report to his fellow European Commissioners on Tuesday (6 November) on future expansion of the EU. There are seven countries in south-east Europe that hope to enter the EU at some point. Each one of them is currently causing concern for the experts in Rehn’s office finalising the report.

Rehn will outline progress achieved so far by candidate countries Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey and identify areas where they need to improve their record. There will also be assessments of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia, which are at different stages of association with Brussels but not yet officially candidates for EU membership.

This is the first enlargement report since EU leaders reached a deal in Lisbon on reforming the Union’s institutions, which should in theory improve the EU’s capacity to integrate new member states. Taking into account the EU’s integration capacity, previously known as ‘absorption capacity’, is among the stated conditions for further enlargement.

Of the three candidacies, Croatia’s is the most advanced, while Turkey’s is the most controversial. The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to capitalise on its landslide victory in July’s general election. Some observers fear that Erdogan’s party, which now also controls the president’s office (previously a bulwark of Kemalist secularism), could push for more strongly Islamic policies and slow down the reforms needed for closer ties with Brussels. A first opportunity may be a new constitution currently being drafted to replace the charter passed during military rule in the early 1980s, which entrenched the military’s role in policymaking. But a more immediate concern for the EU is article 301 of the penal code, which makes it a crime to insult Turkishness and has been used to prosecute journalists and writers. The government says that it wants to revise or scrap article 301 but that the new constitution is a higher priority. Many Turks feel that the EU is backtracking on its commitments. Turkey hopes to open talks on two more subject areas (on health and consumer protection and trans-European networks) before the end of the year. But the Turkish government fears that it has only a small window of opportunity around the time that a panel of ‘wise men’ will be set up to study the future of the Union before matters might be made more complicated by a presidential election in Cyprus in February.

The enlargement report will also take note of worrying developments in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose leaders have sparred in recent days over the future direction of peace implementation in the western Balkans.

Bosnian Serb leaders have been refusing to agree to put their police under central oversight, even though police reform is the EU’s most important outstanding precondition for signing a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with Bosnia. The Commission is now examining a deal reached on Sunday (28 October) between Bosnia’s leading political parties.

Attempts by the EU’s special representative in Bosnia, Miroslav Lajcák, to break the deadlock had provoked angry reactions from the Bosnian Serb capital Banja Luka and from Belgrade.

Serbia completed technical talks on a SAA with the EU in September, but the text will be initialled only once Rehn has decided that Belgrade’s co-operation with the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague is satisfactory. A report from Carla Del Ponte, the court’s chief prosecutor, who held talks in Belgrade last week (25-26 October), gave Serbia a mixed report card. While she commended the political will to arrest the four remaining fugitives wanted by her court, she also said that "more concrete actions" were needed before she could certify full co-operation.

But the main issue burdening relations between the EU and Serbia is the unresolved status of Kosovo. A positive SAA decision will not dissuade Serbia from turning to Moscow, away from the EU, for support in its bid to keep its former province. Should Kosovo, as is widely expected, gain some form of supervised independence, the EU - which plans to deploy its largest-ever civilian mission there - might soon find itself confronted with civil unrest in Kosovo’s Serb areas. Turkey, Bosnia and Serbia face very different problems on their way to closer links with the EU, but they all show up the limitations of the enlargement process as a means to compel domestic reform.

Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for enlargement, will present a report to his fellow European Commissioners on Tuesday (6 November) on future expansion of the EU. There are seven countries in south-east Europe that hope to enter the EU at some point. Each one of them is currently causing concern for the experts in Rehn’s office finalising the report.