Time for a new policy framework in the Western Balkans

Date: 09/01/03

By Dick Leonard

The Greek presidency has the chance to rectify the mistakes made during the 1990s in the war-torn south-east European countries. It is an opportunity that must not be wasted.

TOP priority for the new Greek presidency is tying up the loose ends of the membership negotiations with the ten new member states so that the accession treaty can be signed in Athens on 16 April.

Perhaps equally urgent is to produce a new policy framework for the five states of the Western Balkans, which will be totally surrounded by EU territory by 2007, when Romania and Bulgaria are expected to become members.

The five countries - Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Yugoslavia and Macedonia (together with Kosovo, still technically part of Yugoslavia) - were promised eventual membership of the EU at a special summit conference at Zagreb in 2000. With one exception, they are many years away from achieving this aspiration.

The European Union, quite rightly, has a bad conscience about the parlous state of these countries.

As Chris Patten, the external relations commissioner, said in a recent speech: "The 1990s was a decade of despair, death and destitution in the region. It should have been the hour of Europe but we blew it.

"We could have acted decisively to ensure a peaceful dissolution of the old Yugoslavia but we didn't. We could have shown real leadership and vision but we were found wanting."

Since the end of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, the EU's record has been far better. Together with its member states, it has assumed the main burden of paying for the physical reconstruction of these countries, and it acted promptly and decisively to head off the threat of inter-ethnic warfare in Macedonia.

It is also in the process of taking over, from the UN and NATO, much of the responsibility for policing and peacekeeping activity.

The EU's short term priority has been to stabilise the area in the wake of the conflicts, and with this in mind it offered stability and association agreements to the five countries, which were a great deal more limited in scope than the Europe agreements, and pre-accession accords, reached with the ten east-European candidate countries.

Even so, only two of these agreements have yet been signed - with Croatia and Macedonia and only in Croatia has it been implemented to any great extent. In the other three countries, and in Kosovo, aid from the Union has been linked essentially to repairing war damage and improving security.

Total EU support to the Western Balkans has been running at the rate of about €900 million per annum, but is set to fall to €700m this year and €500m in 2005-6, at a time when smaller amounts of aid from the US and other donors are also likely to decline.

A timely warning against this cutback has come from the Berlin-based organisation, the European Stability Initiative (ESI), headed by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari. It has submitted a report, "Western Balkans 2004", to EU High Representative for Foreign Policy Javier Solana, saying that the Western Balkans is facing a looming crisis of social and economic dislocation which puts at risk some of the EU's most important interests in this strategic region.

It should not be allowed to fall further behind the economic development of the new member states, the report argues, and should be included in the cohesion policies practised within the EU.

An essential element of the cohesion policy has been the co-financing of projects, so that the recipient state has to share the responsibility and assess each proposal in relation to its own scale of priorities. Up until now, all the projects which the EU has supported in the new member states have been co-financed, but none of those in the Western Balkans.

There should be an institutionalised partnership between the Commission and national and sub-national authorities, the ESI argues, and effective multi-annual programming of development efforts. In the period between 2004 and 2006, the programmes could be financed - to the extent of some €400m per annum - from funds left over from pre-accession aid to the ten new members.

The Greek presidency has already decided that the Western Balkans should have a prominent place on the agenda of the Thessaloniki summit next June, when progress since Zagreb is due to be reviewed. The Commission should now come up with detailed proposals of its own to put the EU relationship with the countries involved on a more satisfactory long-term footing.

One country will not be waiting until June to press its own case.

On 18 December, the Croatian parliament passed a motion, supported by all the 12 parties represented, calling upon the government to apply for full membership of the EU before the end of February.

Ministers and officials are now working around the clock on the application, which should reach the secretariat of the Council of Ministers within the next six weeks.

It will then be formally considered by the General Affairs and External Relations Council, which - following previous practice - is expected to ask the Commission to prepare an Opinion on its acceptability. It could well take a year or more before the Commission presents its report.

Croatia is indisputably in a much stronger position to push its own claims.

Its stabilisation process is almost complete, it has settled its border disputes with its neighbours, has made good democratic progress, has a more developed economy and a much higher GDP per head than any of the others.

It argues, with justification, that its state of readiness is now comparable to that of several of the newly admitted member states at the time of their application.

The Croats' unofficial target is to catch up with Bulgaria and Romania and become members in 2007.

This may prove too optimistic, but it would not be all that surprising if they succeeded in overtaking the Turks.

Author says the Greek presidency has the chance to rectify the mistakes made during the 1990s in the war-torn south-east European countries. It is an opportunity that must not be wasted.