Kosovo: The next attack is bound to come

Der Spiegel, Gerald Knaus: Der nächste Angriff kommt bestimmt (3. Oktober 2023)

A guest article by Gerald Knaus

This article was first published in German by Der Spiegel on 3 October 2023: Der nächste Angriff kommt bestimmt

After the latest outbreak of violence in Kosovo, it is clear: Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić will not stop playing with fire. For Germany and the EU, it is high time for a credible integration policy in the Balkans.

In mid-August, I was sitting in a café in Gracanica, a Serb-majority community south of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Across the street, in front of the town hall, a large Serbian flag was flying. In the car park were cars from the police station, where a multi-ethnic police force was on duty. I paid the Serbian waiter in euros, the official currency in Kosovo, and then wandered past a large poster of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić to the Orthodox monastery with its medieval murals of heaven and hell. And finally stood at a crossroads in front of the equestrian statue of a Serbian hero of the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds in 1389. In front of it a writing in Serbian: “Ja volim Gracanicu”, “I love Gracanica.”

If Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić is to be believed, the peaceful small town of Gracanica, with Serbian schools, hospitals, and bilingual street signs, is an illusion. For years, he and his ministers have been warning of state-organised pogroms against Kosovo’s Serb minority, now estimated at just over 100,000, and threatening a military response “to protect them” if that happens. For several months, however, they have been declaring, on Serbian television as well as in letters to MPs around the world, that these pogroms and state “terror” against Serbs are taking place. At the beginning of July, Vučić declared that Nato had “two weeks” left to disarm the Kosovar police in northern Kosovo, otherwise he would have no choice but to protect Kosovo’s Serbs themselves from Albanian terror.

“Hunting Serbs! Displaced Krajina Serbs [Serbs in Croatia] who wanted to visit their villages are arrested on the border … This is one example of “silent exodus” that is applied also in the so-called state of Kosovo, says Savo Strbac (Vesti, 10 July 2023)

Kurti: I want “Operation Storm” in Kosovo. I offered Serbs from the North the Croatian model, which is a success-story, said Albin Kurti. With that he openly stated that the goal is to expel the Serb population (Informer, 12 July 2023)

Epidemic of dangerous ideas: Kosovo crisis should be solved by ethnic cleansing of Serbs?! (Blic, 13 July 2023)

KFOR and the West are encouraging Pristina to sow fear (Politika, 15 July 2023)

Taking inflammatory rhetoric seriously

As for these pogroms: they do not exist. The international organisations stationed in Kosovo know this, of course. But instead of remembering the early nineties, taking inflammatory rhetoric seriously and countering it, the EU, including Germany, decided as recently as June to take “measures” against the government in Pristina: contacts were reduced, aid frozen. The demand on Pristina: it should relax the situation in the north bordering Serbia by withdrawing its special police. This has long been a demand from Belgrade. Why became obvious now, on 24 September, on a dramatic Sunday.

On that day, dozens of Serb paramilitaries with heavy weapons attacked the Kosovar police, shot one policeman, wounded another, and retreated to an Orthodox monastery. Their leader, who has since admitted his role: Milan Radoičić, the dominant Serb politician in Kosovo, Vučić’s man on the ground. The reaction to these attacks, however, came not from the international peacekeeping force Kfor, but from the Kosovar police, pressured by Vučić to retreat. They shot some of the paramilitaries and freed the trapped pilgrims in the monastery. The attempt to start a conflagration failed, but the killed paramilitaries were immediately hailed as heroes in Serbia. The government set a national day of mourning. And although Radoičić admitted his crime, he remained at large.

Now the evidence presented by the government in Pristina that the action was directed by Belgrade must be examined closely. In fact, at the moment everything points to the fact that dozens of heavily armed paramilitaries acted on behalf of the Serbian state. Unofficially, American and European officials confirm this.

What now? The priority of European policy in the Balkans must be to stop all further violence, which could also quickly lead to a new refugee crisis. To do this, the failure of previous policies must be acknowledged and corrected. For nothing about the latest of this escalation was surprising. Back at the end of July, the think tank I founded, the European Stability Initiative (ESI), published a detailed report entitled “Belfast, Kosovo and the End of Peace.” “Belfast” because the 1969 scenario, where paramilitaries became the main players in Northern Ireland for decades, and even the strong British army failed to stop the violence, is again the most likely path to a new hell.

Funeral of Raymond Peter McCreesh, a member of the Provisional IRA (Photo by Chip HIRES/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

When pogroms are invented, they are followed by violence

In Brussels and Berlin, some saw these warnings as exaggerated. They ignored what Serbian politicians announced every day in their media. Yet this is the most important lesson from the dramatic failure of international diplomacy in the Balkans in the early 1990s: It is not what politicians say in English that counts, but how they speak to their own people, what campaigns they run in the media they control and, above all, how they act. In late May 2023, violent demonstrators reinforced from Serbia attacked Kfor soldiers in northern Kosovo so aggressively that dozens of Italian and Hungarian military personnel were injured, some seriously. In early June, Serbian special forces abducted Kosovar police officers who were trying to prevent smuggling, including of weapons, in northern Kosovo. In both cases, there was little reaction from Nato and the EU. Vučić and his proxy Radoičić had to feel encouraged.

Zvecan, Kosovo. 26th May, 2023. A Kosovo Police Special Unit officer walks near a burning car in Zvecan, Kosovo, on May 26, 2023. Clashes between ethnic Serbs and Kosovo Police began after the Serbs gathered in front of the municipality building trying to block the entrance to recently-elected officials. Photo: Stringer/PIXSELL Credit: Pixsell/Alamy Live News
Kosovo Police in Zvecan, Kosovo, on May 26, 2023. Photo: Stringer/PIXSELL Credit: Pixsell/Alamy Live News

If one takes seriously what is currently being said by politicians in Belgrade, then one thing is certain: the next attack is bound to come. The lesson: If pogroms are invented, then violence follows. If they are not called out, the situation will escalate further. Of course, Serbia will not take on Nato directly. Aleksandar Vučić, who was the Secretary General of the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party led by Vojislav Šešelj in the 1990s and was the Minister of Propaganda in a government led by Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade in 1999, remembers the fate of his former superiors: Šešelj and Milošević ended up before an international court in The Hague. Vučić will want to avoid this. And that means: if the USA and Berlin now threaten him with severe consequences, should there be violence again like this September, then a policy of deterrence would have a good chance of success, at least in the short term. Also because Vučić, like his closest ally in the EU, Hungary’s Prime Minister Orbán, will hope that world politics could still change fundamentally in his favour anyway with Trump’s return to the White House in early 2025.

For Germany and the EU, this means: By the end of 2024, we must finally succeed in making violence like that in Northern Ireland in the decades after 1969 as unthinkable in the Balkans as it is today in Central Europe. This means replacing the empty phrases of the “European perspective” and “accelerated integration” of the Balkans, which Aleskandar Vučić has been publicly mocking for years, with a credible integration policy that people can believe in.

A realistic vision for a Berlin peace policy

In concrete terms, the EU could declare at the EU Council in December that it would be ready to grant every Balkan country – including Serbia and Kosovo – access to the EU’s internal market and the EU’s four freedoms by 2028. If they had made all the necessary reforms, strengthened the rule of law and secured minority rights by then. This would also apply to Serbs in Kosovo. That would be an enormously attractive goal. And it would be a vision for the Balkans: by 2030, the borders there should become as invisible in people’s everyday lives as the borders between Poland and Lithuania and Germany and the Netherlands are today. A border between Serbia and Kosovo should soon look like the invisible border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. And without which peace would immediately be in danger there as well.

Invisible borders instead of shifting borders. Minority rights everywhere in the Balkans instead of expulsions, as in Karabakh today. Kosovo and Serbia as neighbours integrated into a European community of law. In addition, access to the large common market. That was the recipe for success of EU integration from 1950 to 1992. In addition, deterrence of all those who rely on violence. That would be a realistic vision for a Berlin peace policy today.

Before it is too late for that. Who is betting on this could also be seen last week when AfD leader Chrupalla rushed to Belgrade and promised Vučić his support.

The Anti-Lausanne Principle – How (not) to set the Balkans aflame again

Ideas matter – and few ideas mattered more in the Balkans in recent decades than the notion that different ethnic groups cannot live together in the long term, and that therefore it is inevitable that one day they need to be separated.

There are many policy makers today who appear to have forgotten the 1980s, and how such ideas – developed by intellectuals, turned into movies and novels by artists, picked up by politicians – prepared the ground for a decade of war, for millions of displaced and for more than 120,000 dead.

But there is no excuse to forget this recent past. This is why ESI will remind those who care about stability in the Balkans about the real reason peace took hold in the Balkans in recent years: a battle of ideas that was won at huge effort and cost.

Two ideas in particular were defeated.

The first: force is justified as a tool of politics to defend ethnic (tribal) group interests. Criminals can become legitimate national heros if they use their weapons in the name of their tribe.  And the second: it is not natural for people of different ethnicities, religions, identities to live together. You are only ever save if you are in control. You can never be save as a minority.

In 2004 it looked for a moment as if these ideas would stage a breakthrough in Kosovo. During two days, Kosovo Serbs were viciously attacked by Kosovo Albanian nationalists.  And immediately following these two days, leaders in Belgrade argued that this meant that coexistence had become impossible.

As we argued at the time, this logic clearly implied that coexistence was also impossible in Bosnia – where worse atrocities happened for years – and in parts of Macedonia (where fighting had erupted in 2001). It was impossible also in Croatia, and logically everywhere in the Balkans where minorities lived. And minorities lived everywhere: in Serbia, in Montenegro, in Kosovo.

And so we published a report in 2004 which we hoped had some impact on the debate: “The Lausanne Principle”. There we argued that the temptation of “simple” solutions to minority issues – by exchanging either territory of people – is deadly. We pointed to the example of the original Lausanne treaty – and what it meant for generations of Greeks in Turkey. We noted that the whole European (and US) strategy after the 1990s was based on the opposite idea: that Balkan nations were held to the standard of how they treated minorities, and that by showing that minorities were not only save but could live decent lives as equal citizens Balkan nations could prove that they were ready to join the rest of the EU.

Today tribal thinking is raising its ugly head also inside the EU. But this is not a reason to export this toxic idea to the Balkans. It is in particular a huge threat when it comes to the future of Kosovo – and a total betrayal of Kosovo Serbs, who did NOT flee their homes in 1999, nor in 2004. And who would now be told that unless they lived in or moved to Serbia they had no future.

We strongly believe that for this reason it is not a matter only for Pristina and Belgrade to settle their relations. Some things the EU should make clear are not compatible with European principles.  For instance, any exchange of people against their will or under pressure would be totally unacceptable. And so should any exchange of territory based on ethnic principles.

Here is what we wrote in 2004 (excerpts):

On the violence in March that year 

Five years into the international administration of Kosovo, two violent days in March 2004 have sorely tested the international commitment to a multiethnic Kosovo. Directed against Kosovo’s minorities and against the international mission itself, the violence has left many wondering whether UNMIK has the capacity to achieve its objectives in the face of open resistance.

This is a dangerous moment for international policy in the region. The urgent priority for the Kosovo mission and the incoming Special Representative of the Secretary General is to reaffirm the international commitment to multiethnic society, at both the diplomatic and the practical level.

This paper argues that the policies needed in response to the March riots must be based on the practical needs of Serbs living in Kosovo today. The paper finds that the current reality of Kosovo Serbs differs from the common perception in important ways. There are still nearly 130,000 Serbs living in Kosovo today, representing two-thirds of the pre-war Serb population. Of these, two-thirds (75,000) are living south of the River Ibar in Albanian-majority areas. Almost all of the urban Serbs have left, with North Mitrovica now the last remaining urban outpost. However, most of the rural Serbs have never left their homes. The reality of Kosovo Serbs today is small communities of subsistence farmers scattered widely across Kosovo.

Against this background, the paper argues that the Serbian government’s plan for creating autonomous Serb enclaves in Kosovo is dangerously flawed. Kosovo Serbs cannot be separated into enclaves without mass displacement of both Serbs and Albanians, increasing hostility and further compromising the security of Serbs. Any attempt to implement this vision leads inevitably towards renewed violence. If, as seems likely, the Belgrade plan is a tactical ploy aimed at securing the partition of Kosovo, it amounts to a betrayal of a large majority of Kosovo Serbs.

The paper argues that a sustainable solution for Kosovo cannot be based upon the Lausanne principle: the negotiated exchange of territory and population common in post-conflict settlements in the Balkans in the early 20th century. Serb communities in Kosovo will only be viable if the territory remains unified and Serbs are able to participate as full citizens in multiethnic institutions. The stakes are extremely high, both for Kosovo Serbs and for the international community, whose entire strategy in the region over the past decade has been based on a commitment to multiethnic society.

The essence of the ‘Standards before Status’ approach is that Kosovo’s institutions of self-government must take responsibility for ensuring that minority communities can live in Kosovo in safety and dignity. The paper proposes three practical measures for making this Standard a reality:

  1. a redoubling of efforts on return and repossession of property, with a view to completing the process by the end of 2005;
  2. ensuring that multiethnic security structures in Kosovo are strengthened, properly equipped and placed under the political responsibility of the elected Kosovo government, through a ministry of public security;
  3. carefully targeted reform of local government structures to ensure that Kosovo Serbs receive adequate public services in the places and circumstances in which they now live.

In addition, the paper argues that a renewed effort to overcome the division of Mitrovica would be the most positive response to the March riots, removing Kosovo’s most dangerous flashpoint and opening up possibilities for negotiated solutions on a range of highly contentious issues.

A fundamental precondition, however, is that the international community explicitly rule out any solution for Kosovo based on territorial bargains or the expulsion of minority populations. Whatever its final status, Kosovo must remain whole and undivided, providing a safe home for all of its traditional communities. The Contact Group and the European Union should serve notice that any partition scheme will be vetoed in the Security Council. They should also serve notice that an ethnically cleansed Kosovo will never be seen as fit for sovereignty. Let it be made clear to everyone concerned that the anti-Lausanne consensus that guides policy in Europe today is too solid to be shaken by an angry mob.

On Partition

The obstacles to implementing the Belgrade plan [of ethnic enclaves throughout Kosovo] are so great that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is merely a negotiating ploy – a maximalist position designed to secure a tactical advantage. If so, what is the agenda that underlies it? The terms of the plan itself suggest an answer.

There is only one area of Kosovo where the proposal could be implemented without violent upheavals – the relatively compact Serb-majority area north of the Ibar. As the plan itself notes, being “close to central Serbia”, the north of Kosovo is safer and easier to defend than the Kosovo interior. Creating an autonomous province in Northern Kosovo would involve undoing some of UNMIK’s recent policy successes, particularly the establishment of a multiethnic court and Kosovo Police Service in North Mitrovica. However, many of the institutions required for an independent administration already exist.

There are those, both among the political class in Belgrade and in the international press, who believe that the complex institutional mechanisms required for “autonomy within autonomy” are impractical, and would rather see a simpler solution: the partition of Kosovo into a fully independent, Albanian south, and a northern part that would remain within Serbia. They believe that this is an outcome on which both sides might agree – the Kosovo government in order to secure independence for most of Kosovo, and the Serbian government as a face-saving compromise.

As one commentator in the Serbian daily Kurir put it: “We should either tell the remaining Kosovo Serbs that they cannot survive there and that they should move to central Serbia, or we should try to divide what still might be divided, thus at least a part of Kosovo really to be part of Serbia.” Cedomir Antic, a historian and member of the liberal group G17 Plus, proposed drawing a “green line” as in Cyprus. He suggests a Security Council resolution to divide the province according to the census data from 1991. Antic erroneously assumes that if “the Serbian canton includes the northern part of Kosovo plus the part around Gracanica,” then “90 percent of Serbs would enter the entity.”

There are also commentators on the international side who consider partition an unavoidable, if not desirable, outcome. As Ian Traynor put it in The Guardian: “The Serbian elite is not so dismayed to see Kosovo Serbs driven out of their villages. It thinks this will reinforce the case for partition. Albanians too may ultimately back a partition that maximises territory and entrenches an independent Kosovo. With a few exceptions they want Kosovo ethnically pure. In the middle stands the NATO-led international administration, which for five years has been pushing a multi-ethnic, multicultural Kosovo that neither side wants.”

Those opposed to partition have pointed to the dangers for Presevo or Macedonia, if the international community acquiesces in further border changes. In fact, the most immediate danger is to the many Serbs (up to 75,000) living in the Albanian-majority south. If the international community were to accept partition, caving in to demands for territorial separation from extremists on both sides, it would leave itself in an extremely weak position to protect the minorities left in the south. This is precisely the scenario that would lead to an intensification of mob violence in Kosovo and the expulsion of the remaining Serbs.

It is not likely that the international community will openly acquiesce in the partition of Kosovo, nor even that the Serbian government will officially advocate abandoning the Serbs living in the south of Kosovo. The real danger is that persistent talk of territorial solutions, along the lines of the Belgrade plan, will set in motion a chain of events that will make this outcome inevitable.

Dangerous ideas

At the turn of the 19th century, when the nations of South Eastern Europe were emerging from a crumbling Ottoman empire, state-building was often accompanied by the brutal expulsion of ethnic and religious minorities. When the Great Powers sat together to redraw the map of the region following major conflicts, they considered forcible population exchange to be a legitimate technique for solving “minority questions”. In 1913, the treaty that followed the Second Balkan War included a Protocol on the exchange of population. In 1919, Greece and Bulgaria approved a Convention Respecting the Reciprocal Emigration of their Racial Minorities. In 1934, 100,000 Muslims were resettled from (Romanian) Dobrudja to Turkey. It was a brutal approach: solving minority problems by eliminating the minorities themselves.

The most infamous of these agreements was the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the Greek-Turkish war in Asia Minor. At Lausanne, the Greek and Turkish governments and the Great Powers stated as the very first article of the treaty the principle of preventive exchange of population:

“As from the 1st May, 1923, there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory.”

The result was the forced displacement of almost 1.5 million people, destroying communities that had existed since ancient times. While many had already been displaced by conflict, there were still over 200,000 Greeks in Anatolia and more than 354,000 Turks in Greece. Many of these were “prosperous and satisfied, feeling secure and having no desire to abandon their homes.” As the Greek prime minister noted at the time, “both the Greek and the Turkish population involved… are protesting against this procedure… and display their dissatisfaction by all the means at their disposal.” With the principal of territorial separation accepted at the international level, however, there was nowhere to appeal, and the expulsions continued to their bitter conclusion.

In the first half of the 1990s, the shadow of Lausanne loomed large as Europe’s democratic governments met once again to decide the fate of South Eastern Europe. During interminable negotiations on the Bosnian war, the leaders of the warring parties sought to reinforce their territorial claims by expelling minority populations. As one Bosnian observed at the time, “The maps of a divided Bosnia-Herzegovina passed around at international conferences have become more of a continuing cause for the tragedy that has befallen us than a solution.” The international community faced a choice between acquiescing in a territorial solution based on ethnic cleansing, or finding a way to reverse the ‘facts on the ground’ which had emerged from the conflict.

The year 1995, with the horror of the Srebrenica massacre and the signing of the Dayton Agreement, marked both the nadir and a turning point in the international approach to the region. The peace agreement could not immediately reverse the injustices of the war. However, it did create the framework of a multiethnic state, and the promise that those expelled from their homes would be able to choose whether or not to return. Annex 7 of the Dayton Agreement contains a provision that is the exact opposite of Article 1 of the Treaty of Lausanne: “All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin. They shall have the right to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities.”

In the immediate post-war environment in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing still firmly in power, the prospects of reintegrating the communities seemed remote. During 1996, continuing displacement far outnumbered minority returns. In 1998, reconstructed houses were still being torched by angry mobs incited by shadowy figures. Many believed that the idea of restoring a multiethnic Bosnia was a dangerous illusion that would only bring further violence. They argued that the only ‘realistic’ path to security was the partition of the country.

Yet the international response was remarkable. With every violent attack on returnees, the international determination to restore a multiethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina was strengthened. SFOR took a more vigorous approach to supporting return. International reconstruction programmes were made faster and more flexible. In 1999, an enormous international campaign was launched to implement the property laws that enabled displaced persons to recover homes they had lost during the war. By 2000, the tide had turned. Bosniacs and Croats were returning to homes across Central Bosnia, breaking down the armed enclaves left over from the war. By 2002, Bosniacs were returning in significant numbers across Republika Srpska. By 2004, over 200,000 families (around a million people) had recovered possession of their properties. With the success of the return movement, the vicious ideology of Milosevic, Karadzic and Tudjman was thoroughly discredited. Today, as international troops and police are steadily reduced, it is local, multiethnic police forces which provide security for minorities across Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It appeared that the international community had finally developed a principled and effective answer to the vicious logic of ethnic separation. In Kosovo in 1999 and in the Presevo valley in southern Serbia in 2000, the international community responded decisively. When an armed uprising in Macedonia in 2001 threatened to escalate into civil war, there was an immediate intervention to preserve multiethnic society. Each time, the settlement was founded on the conviction that different ethnic communities are able to live together. There were always some who believed that multiethnicity was naïve, utopian or dangerous, and that partition was the only route to stability. They were, however, disregarded. Not only was ethnic cleansing condemned as abhorrent, but systematic programmes to restore property rights and freedom of movement were developed to reverse the new realities created through violence. The very idea that stability could be achieved through exchange of populations was decisively rejected on both moral and pragmatic grounds. Since Srebrenica, international policy in the Balkans has been based on an anti-Lausanne consensus.

There are those who believe that acquiescing in the partition of Kosovo would be a simpler and more pragmatic solution than continuing to defend multiethnic society. Yet the Belgrade plan or any suggestion of partition are premised on a mass resettlement of population – a miniature version of the population exchanges agreed between Turkey and Greece in Lausanne. They are neither simple nor pragmatic. Forcible expulsions (whether officially sanctioned or carried out by an angry mob) would raise tensions to an impossible degree. The people in question – rural communities of subsistence farmers – have shown throughout the past decade that they are deeply attached to their traditional homes and lands, and would only leave under direct threat of violence. As one student of earlier Balkan population exchanges noted:

“The attachment of the individual to the soil where he was born is so deeply rooted that only the fear of an imminent peril to his life may force him to emigrate… On the basis of past experience, one is forced to conclude that the transfer of populations is intimately connected with the prevalence of extensive political upheavals.”

Any territorial exchange could only be accomplished through upheavals more extensive than any Kosovo has seen to date. A solution built upon further ethnic cleansing would be a dramatic failure for one of the most substantial post-conflict interventions ever undertaken, and a huge loss in credibility for the multilateral institutions – the United Nations, NATO, the OSCE and the EU – which are responsible.

It is a measure of the crisis of confidence on the international side that Serbian proposals for ethnic separation were greeted as “a good basis for resuming dialogue” by former Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Harri Holkeri. No longer confident in its ability to defend multiethnic society, the international community is once again flirting with the Lausanne principle. This is a dangerous moment for international policy in the region. Rearticulating a commitment to a multiethnic Kosovo is the most pressing priority for the new SRSG and the wider international community.

Needed: an Anti-Lausanne Consensus

In 1955, a rumour, subsequently proved untrue, spread through Istanbul that Ataturk’s birthplace in Thessaloniki had been vandalised by Greek nationalists. The result was serious rioting in the remaining multiethnic areas of the city, leading to numerous deaths and hundreds of looted and destroyed houses. As one Greek eyewitness noted at the time:

“It lasted less than twenty-four hours… Everyone shut themselves into their houses. Some were injured. They [the mob] destroyed the priest’s house. They tried to set fire to the church, but it would not burn… They did more damage in other places. We (the Greeks) were their main targets. But they also attacked Armenian and Jewish houses, probably without realising. We were afraid they would attack again. That was when people gradually began to emigrate.”

This and many similar episodes were the inevitable product of the Lausanne principle: the process of expulsion of ethnic groups – Greeks from Turkey; Turks from the Balkans – continued over subsequent decades until it reached its inevitable, tragic conclusion. By the 1960s, the idea of ethnic separation had spread to Cyprus, with predictable results. The spirit of Lausanne proved extremely difficult to put back into the bottle.

Will the riots of March 2004, also started by an unsubstantiated rumour and resulting in senseless destruction, set in motion a similar process in Kosovo? Any student of South East European history would find plenty of reasons to be pessimistic. After all, today there are no Greeks in Varna or Istanbul; no Turks in Belgrade or Thessaloniki; no Bulgarians or Circassians in Northern Dobrudja; no Germans in the Vojvodina. Once population transfers became accepted as a legitimate solution to ethnic conflict, it virtually ensured that this was the way in which all ethnic conflicts would end up being resolved.

Yet looking back over the decade since the fall of Srebrenica and the Dayton Peace Agreement, there is also cause for optimism. The international commitment to the right to return, not just as a legal principle but also as a practical reality, has offered a genuine alternative to the Lausanne principle. As a direct consequence, despite the horrific violence of the 1990s, today there are Croats in Travnik, Bosniacs who have reconstructed mosques in Prijedor, large Serb communities in Drvar, Macedonians and Albanians living shoulder to shoulder in Tetovo, Albanians and Serbs side by side in Bujanovac. None of these were easy successes. There was no shortage of violent challenges to multiethnicity: arson of Bosniac houses across Republika Srpska in 1996; riots in Brcko in 1997 which drove out the international officials; murder of Croats in Central Bosnia in 1998; riots against Serb returnees in Drvar in 1998; the destruction of mosques and churches in Presevo and Western Macedonia in more recent times. The violence showed how high the stakes are. Yet none of these events shook the international conviction that a stable Balkans could not be based on the Lausanne principle. By holding its line against territorial solutions, the international community has succeeded in stabilising large parts of the region.

Has the international community’s commitment to multiethnicity been destroyed by the March riots, leading to a gradual acquiescence in the partition of Kosovo? Or will it lead to a strengthened international commitment to multiethnic institutions and a non-negotiable right to return? Much will depend on the response of the international community in the coming period, and the lessons which UNMIK draws from its experience. Much will also depend on the political choices made by politicians in Belgrade and Pristina.

While most of South Eastern Europe is looking forward to joining a Europe which is very different from that of the Lausanne era, the logic of ethnic separatism continues to find adherents in parts of the former Yugoslavia. Giving in to them at this late stage would not only be a betrayal of minority communities across the region, it would also compromise the basic values on which today’s European Union is constructed.

To ensure that the destructive spirit of Lausanne stays in the bottle, three things are required. Efforts to support return and property repossession need to be redoubled. Multiethnic law enforcement institutions need to be strengthened, properly equipped and made politically accountable. Institutions able to deliver effective public services to Kosovo’s minorities in the places and circumstances in which they now live need to be designed and established.

A fundamental precondition for all this to happen, however, is that the international community must explicitly rule out a solution for Kosovo based on territorial bargains or the expulsion of minority populations. Whatever its final status, Kosovo must remain whole and undivided, providing a safe home for all of its traditional communities. The Contact Group and the European Union should serve notice that any partition scheme will be vetoed in the Security Council. They should also serve notice that an ethnically cleansed Kosovo will never be seen as fit for sovereignty. Let it be made clear to everyone concerned that the anti-Lausanne consensus that guides policy in Europe today is too solid to be shaken by an angry mob.

 

Alpbach appeal to Vucic, Thaci and European leaders – Adi Cerimagic

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New perspectives on EU enlargement (25 August 2018)

Speakers: 

Johannes Hahn, European Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy & Enlargement Negotiations, Brussels

Alexander van der Bellen, Federal President, Republic of Austria, Vienna

Borut Pahor, President, Slovenia, Ljubljana

Hashim Thaci, President, Kosovo, Prishtina

Aleksandar Vucic, President, Serbia, Belgrade

Adnan Cerimagic, Analyst, ESI – European Stability Initiative, Sarajevo

Tena Prelec, Research Associate, London School of Economics and Political Science, London; PHD candidate, University of Sussex

Florian Eder, Managing Editor, Politico, Brussels, Chair          

Adnan Cerimagic, speech

Dear Alpbach community. Dear friends.

Thank you very much for an opportunity to to talk to you this evening. It is so great to be back here after eight years.

Let me introduce myself. I think it is the easiest way for me to convey a message that I would like you to leave this room with.

I was born in 1986 in a small town in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina called Doboj. Today, Doboj is in Republika Srpska, one of the two Bosnian-Herzegovinian entities.

I was five years old when the war broke out in former Yugoslavia. I was six when fighting began in Bosnia. Together with my mother and my brother I spent the war as a refugee in Croatia. My father remained in Bosnia and fought in the war.

We were lucky because we all survived. When the war ended in 1995 I was 9. Throughout my primary and secondary school education there was peace in Bosnia. Ther was peace also when I went abroad to study, first in Austria and then in Belgium. There was peace also in 2013 when I returned to Bosnia to live and work there. There is still peace also today in Bosnia.

But I remember very vividely February 1996, when together with my family we went to Doboj for the first time. It was city of horror where Bosniaks and Croats were expelled, all minarets and mosques destroyed and many houses damaged. We did not even dare to say our Muslim names out loud on the streets. For months and years after the war I had nightmares about Doboj.

But since then Bosnia has changed dramatically. The number of foreign soldiers keeping the peace went from 60,000 in 1996 to just less than a thousand today, mostly Austrian soldiers. Since 2006 there is a joint army and conscription has been abolished. I am part of generation of young Bosnians and Herzegovinians that where never forced to use a gun.

But today I stand before you and tell you this story because I am genuinely worried. And I will tell you why.

I do not remember the time before the war but I read a lot about how Doboj turned into a nightmare. I read a lot of Yugoslav intellectuals and politicians talking about borders, injustice and ethnic rights. They were all making a simple but destructive argument:

You are only safe IF your own ethnic group is in control.

You are only safe WHEN and WHERE your own ethnic group is in control.

This idea destroyed Yugoslavia and Doboj. It destroyed families, it has led to mass expulsions and genocide in Srebrenica. It turned borders into frontlines, created new borders drawn in human blood.

But ideas can change. And they did in Bosnia. Doboj is a good example.

Half of the pre-war non-Serb population returned to live there today: almost 20,000 of them. Mosques and minarets had been rebuilt.

The Doboj of my nightmare is today an ordinary city, where Bosniaks and Croats do not fear their Serb mayor. They even vote for him repeatedly. And they all face same challenges: poor health and educational system, too few jobs to compete for.

And this is why I am worried. Today’s Doboj was possible because international community had a clear policy:

NO MORE CHANGES OF BORDERS ALONG ETHNIC LINES.

Serbs should be safe in Central Bosnia, as much as Croats in Banja Luka. Bosniaks in Doboj or Srebrenica. Macedonians should be safe in Tetovo, as much as Bosniaks in Novi Pazar, Albanians in Presevo, or Serbs in Gracanica and Mitrovica.

Some ideas seem innocent at first, but as they grow up they can become monstrous.  The idea that you are only safe if, when and where your own ethnic group is in control is such idea.

This is why I plead to Balkan leaders, in particular those sitting at this panel today, not to go down this road, again. I also plead to European leaders, in particular those sitting at this panel and those in audience, to state clearly they would oppose it if the Balkan leaders decided to take that road.

The task for our generation is to turn all Balkan borders into European borders: like those between between Tyrol and South Tyrol. In order to do that we will have to do a lot: build institutions based on rule of law, allow freedom of media and do a lot more. It is time.

Thank you very much.

PS: The video is here: https://www.facebook.com/forumalpbach/videos/574682706268252/

252077fb-ab29-46e3-8cee-2bb30df50f77

A simple idea: All Balkan countries take the OECD PISA test – and the Commission includes it in its Progress Report

 

Sometimes a simple idea has the potential to have a lot of impact. Here is one simple idea for the day, split into three concrete recommendations:

a. the European Commission – and in particular DG enlargement – ask all Western Balkan countries to take the regular PISA tests of the OECD, as one important way to assess whether in the future their economies will be able to “withstand competitive pressure” – which is one of the 1993 Copenhagen criteria.

b. the European Commission includes the scores of PISA as one of its main indicators in the annual progress report section on economic criteria – and includes a table comparing the performance of countries in the region with the rest of the EU.

c. civil society organisations in Balkan countries use this as a trigger to launch a broader debate in their countries on the quality and importance of education in national debates. Both of which are currently – to put it mildly – sub-optimal for countries trying to converge with a much more prosperous European Union.

This morning I met senior people in DG Enlargement in Brussels and made this proposal. I also made it in many recent presentations with EU ambassadors and EU officials in Paris, Skopje, Zagreb, The Hague, Berlin, Rome, Ankara and Istanbul. And as a result of some feedback I am increasingly hopeful on the first and second recommendation above. (This in turn will help with recommendation three.)

For more on all this see our forthcoming report on how to assess in future progress reports whether a candidate has a “functioning market economy”. For those impatient now, here are a few core facts:

Background: candidates, potential candidates and PISA

It seems obvious: one of the most important factors contributing to future development of an economy is the quality of the national education system.  And one of the most straightforward ways to launch a debate on this is to look at the OECD’s PISA tests, taken since 2000, every three years in some 65 countries.

Take a look at some recent findings:

PISA results – mathematics 2012

Taiwan (top country)[1]

560
Netherlands (top EU15 country) 523
Estonia (top EU13 country) 521
Croatia 471
Serbia 449
Turkey 448
Bulgaria (lowest EU country) 439
Montenegro 410
Albania 394
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Kosovo
Macedonia

PISA results – reading 2012

Japan (top country)[2] 538
Finland (top EU15 country) 524
Poland (top EU13 country) 518
Croatia 485
Turkey 475
Serbia 446
Bulgaria (lowest EU country) 436
Montenegro 422
Albania 394
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Kosovo
Macedonia

PISA results – science 2012

Japan (top country)[3] 547
Finland (top EU15 country) 545
Estonia (top EU13 country) 541
Croatia 491
Turkey 463
Serbia 445
Cyprus (lowest EU country) 438
Montenegro 410
Albania 397
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Kosovo
Macedonia

 

These tables raise many fascinating and important policy questions:

1. How can Albania and Montenegro close the serious gap (serious even compared to other countries in the region)?

2. How can all these countries learn from Estonia or Poland, some of the best performers among former communist countries?

3.  Where would Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina stand if they took the test? (Macedonia took the test in 2000: 381 in math, 401 in science, 373 in reading – abysmal scores I discussed in a recent Rumeli Observer; it is now taking it again for the first time this year).

Of course it would also be useful to have other credible education statistics from ALL candidates and potential candidates that allow for EU-wide and Europe-wide comparisons.
Here are some good statistics which already exist for the EU and some of the candidate countries. Again, they raise interesting policy issues.

They might also – if properly highlighted – trigger more important policy debates.

 

4 YEAR OLDS IN SCHOOL

How many 4 year old are in primary or pre-primary education? In the EU

91.7 % of four year-olds were in pre-primary or primary education across the whole of the EU-27 in 2010. Participation rates of four year-olds in pre-primary or primary education were generally high — national averages of over 95 % in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; as well as in Iceland and Norway. By contrast, Greece, Poland and Finland reported that fewer than 70 % of four year-olds were enrolled; lower rates were also recorded in the EFTA countries of Liechtenstein and Switzerland, as well as in the acceding and candidate countries of Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Turkey.”

Only national data are available for Croatia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (data for 2010), where rates stood at 57.4 % and 24.0 % respectively. More than half of the 25 level 2 Turkish regions reported that less than 20.0 % of four year-olds participated in pre-primary or primary education in 2011. The lowest participation rate was recorded for the southern Turkish region of Gaziantep, Adıyaman, Kilis (9.7 %), while the second lowest rate was recorded for İstanbul (10.9 %).”[4]

17 YEAR OLDS IN EDUCATION

“The number of students aged 17 in education (all levels combined) in the EU-27 in 2010 was 5.2 million, equivalent to 91.7 % of all 17-year-olds. The age of 17 is important as it often marks the age at which young people are faced with a choice between: remaining in education; following some form of training; or looking for a job. The number of 17 year-olds in education relative to the population of 17 year-olds exceeded 80 % in the vast majority of the regions within the EU in 2011, and this pattern was repeated across all of the EFTA regions … As such, for one reason or another, the vast majority of young people aged 17 remained in the education system at or even after the end of compulsory schooling.”

This indicates, for instance, a clear problem in Turkey:

“Among the acceding and candidate country regions, the proportion of 17 year-olds who remained in education was above 80.0 % in Croatia (national data) and three Turkish regions (including the capital city region of Ankara and two north-western regions of Bursa, Eskişehir, Bilecik and Tekirdağ, Edirne, Kırklareli). There were four Turkish regions where the proportion of 17 year-olds who remained in education was 50.0 % or lower — they were all in the south and east of the country, namely: Sanlıurfa, Diyarbakır; Mardin, Batman, Sırnak, Siirt; Ağri, Kars, Iğdir, Ardahan; and Van, Muş, Bitlis, Hakkari. The lowest ratio of 17 year-olds remaining in education was recorded in Van, Mus, Bitlis, Hakkari, where the share was only slightly more than one third (35.5 %) in 2011.

“An indicator that presents information about early leavers from education and training tracks the proportion of individuals aged 18–24 who have finished no more than a lower secondary education, and who are not involved in further education or training: some 13.5 % of 18–24 year-olds in the EU-27 were classified as early leavers from education and training in 2011, with a somewhat higher proportion of male early leavers (15.3 %) compared with female early leavers (11.6 %). Europe’s growth strategy, Europe 2020, has set an EU-27 target for the proportion of early leavers from education and training to be below 10 % by 2020; there are individual targets for each of the Member States that range from 5 % to 29 %.”

Tertiary education:

“Tertiary education is the level of education offered by universities, vocational universities, institutes of technology and other institutions that award academic degrees or professional certificates. In 2010 (the 2009/10 academic year), the number of students enrolled in tertiary education in the EU-27 stood at 19.8 million; this was equivalent to 62.7 % of all persons aged 20–24.

In candidate countries:

“In Turkey there was a particularly high concentration of tertiary students in Bursa, Eskişehir, Bilecik — this may be attributed to there being an open university in Eskişehir, where a high proportion of students are enrolled on distance learning courses. Otherwise, the ratio of students enrolled in tertiary education to residents aged 20–24 was below 60 % for all of the remaining regions in the candidate and accession countries.”

Tertiary attainment

“In 2011, for the EU-27 as a whole, just over one third (34.6 %) of 30–34 year-olds had completed tertiary education. These figures support the premise that a rising proportion of the EU’s population is studying to a higher level — in keeping with one of the Europe 2020 targets, namely, that by 2020 at least 40 % of persons aged 30–34 in the EU-27 should have attained a tertiary level education.”

Again Turkey is backward:

“Bati Anadolu (23.6 %) — which includes the Turkish capital city of Ankara — was the only Turkish region to report that more than one in five of its residents aged 30–34 had attained a tertiary level education. By contrast, the lowest ratios … were recorded for the north-east of Turkey (Kuzeydoğu Anadolu), where only just over 1 in 10 (10.2 %) of the population aged 30–34 had attained a tertiary level education.

 

One thing should be obvious: if PISA rankings and such tables are seriously discussed in candidate countries, everyone would benefit. And if the EU can manage to encourage a focus on such issues – through its own regular assessments – everyone would gain.

So let us hope that this simple idea will indeed be picked up.

 


[1] Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong excluded as cities.

[2] Sic.

[3] Sic

[6] Croatia, 2002; Serbia, 2004.

[7] Albania, 2007.

[8] Albania, 2009.

 

Enlargement reloaded – ESI proposal for a new generation of progress reports

Does EU enlargement policy change countries? Can it inspire the people who have to push through deep and complex reforms? Does it help ensure respect for fundamental rights?

What really are the minimum political standards that candidates will have to meet? What is, in the European Commission’s view, a “functioning market economy”?

What is the future of the Directorate General for Enlargement, the department of the European Commission in charge of this policy? And what is the future direction of the DG for Enlargement’s actions, given the unpopularity of the current policy in certain key member states?

 

Measuring alignment?

2013 EU assessments of countries according to the 32 chapters assessed. When it comes to the state of alignment, Turkey is ahead, despite many chapters being blocked. Macedonia is second, despite not being allowed to negotiate. Serbia is ahead of Montenegro. In October 2013 Albania was the very last. For the origins of the assessments in the 2013 reports see at the bottom of this text. The effects of producing such tables in a credible way is the subject of this text.

For the score this conversion used is:  Advanced = 3 points, Moderate = 1 point, Early = 0 points (Source: EU progress reports – see below!). Since Bosnia and Kosovo have different types of progress reports they are not included here.

 

This week in Brussels I gave a presentation on the future of EU enlargement policy. The occasion was a strategy brainstorming session of the senior team of DG for Enlargement in Brussels, made up of some 60 people. The meeting followed similar presentations to policy makers in Berlin, Stockholm, Zagreb, Skopje, Brussels, Istanbul, Paris, and Rome. While I spoke in Brussels, my colleague Kristof presented similar ideas to Croatian Foreign Minister, Vesna Pusic, in Zagreb.

I was asked to be provocative. So I started with a personal encounter from a few weeks ago.

During a late night conversation in Zagreb, a journalist from a very respected European paper in a large EU member state told me that in his view “DG Enlargement should be shut down.” The argument, (which I had heard before in large EU member states I know well) was as follows:

None of the countries in the Balkans (or Turkey) are today even close to meeting what should be the EU’s demanding standards. They have weak institutions, corrupt administrations, create few or no jobs, and have incredibly polarised political environments. Nor are they moving in the right direction at a credible speed in overcoming these problems to make real change likely in the next decade or two. The EU has already admitted too many weak countries. Against this background having a DG for Enlargement creates constant pressure to repeat an earlier mistake. “Can you really imagine Albania in the EU any time soon?” And if you cannot, what then, is the point of a DG for Enlargement?

A few years ago such a view would have been very radical. In some European member state parliaments it is now on the way to becoming the new mainstream.

Of course, there will continue to be a DG dealing with enlargement for the foreseeable future. There is a policy, there are commitments, and there is inertia. The “European perspective” still produces real results. It is an “anchor.” It is leverage, at a low cost to the EU.

However the challenge posed by skeptics calls for a credible answer to the question of whether or not the basic premise of accession policy – that it changes countries for the better, and for good – is valid. And does the European Commission offer credible assessments of progress, or is it condemned by bureaucratic self-interest to be a cheerleader for badly prepared countries? (Or, to avoid this criticism, does it end up being seen as unfair in accession states?)

We accept that there is a crisis of credibility of the process. We are also convinced that there is an opportunity to substantially improve the impact of what is being done today by the EU in accession countries without changing the basic policy. The focus must return to the concrete and visible results in accession countries –  “concrete” and “visible” for skeptics as well.

Enlargement policy needs to mobilise people or it fails. Without the mobilisation of policy makers, civil servants, civil society, and interest groups in accession countries, the kind of changes that have to happen will not happen.

It is here that we encounter a problem with the way many measure accession progress today: the language of “counting chapters opened.” Any complex process generates technical language, bureaucratic procedures, and jargon for those most involved. In the case of enlargement, however, the technical language has crowded out a focus on what makes this policy worthwhile and inspiring.

Recently I asked some of my Turkish friends what they thought the EU should do next in Turkey. Their answer: “Open Chapter 23. Then the EU can seriously discuss fundamental rights with Turkey.” This is how very serious and committed people talk, full of good intentions. And yet, it is puzzling. For when one asks “what do you believe happens after a ‘chapter is opened’ that makes any real progress more likely? Is there evidence that ‘chapter-opening’ produces change?” people pause. Rightly so, as I showed in my Brussels presentation. There is in fact no evidence that “chapter opening” produces change – Turkey shows this best in recent years – that progress in “un-opened” chapters is faster or slower than in “opened” ones. A country can make all the reforms and then “open and close” all chapters at the very end (Croatia did this in many key policy fields). It can open many chapters and make no progress for years.

See this table. Note that it is based on the Commission’s own assessments in the 2013 progress reports (For more on these assessments see the ESI scorecard further below):

The argument is not against the need to have “chapters,” which define separate policy areas, from consumer protection to public procurement or waste management. These are useful conventions to deal with the vast range of European standards and policies.

However, what really matters is that the EU spells out clearly, publicly, fairly, and strictly – and in a way that is understood by the broadest possible public in Albania, Turkey, Serbia or Macedonia – WHAT the basic and fundamental rights and standards should be in a country that wants to join. And it should do this regardless of whether a “chapter” is opened (or a member state decides to veto this, as has happened and may well continue to).

This is what accession is about from the very beginning. To allow for a “veto” against focusing on key issues makes no sense at all. What does make sense is a focus on closing “chapters,” which in any case only happens at the very end, and in turn depends on the nature of the reforms being done!

So by all means, open Chapter 23 with Turkey (and every country), if this is possible. And yes, it was good to “open a chapter on regional policy” (Chapter 22), last summer. It was a “signal” that there was still a process in motion. But in the end, it was also a strange response to the drama of the Gezi protests and their subsequent repression. Yes, there is a process, as the EU stated, but one that does not address WHY opening Chapter 22 is an answer to the question most observers were asking about the state of democracy. How did opening a chapter on regional policy change anything meaningful in Turkey in 2013?  What has it changed since this was done?

The bureaucratic steps designed many years ago to make enlargement manageable are here to stay: the categories of potential candidates, opening one of 35 chapters, opening benchmarks, closing chapters. The bureaucratic process is not the problem. Nor is the fact that at every step, 28 member states have a veto. This is simply a fact of life.

However, what can and must happen is that the European Commission – and supporters of enlargement – see this ladder and the more than 70 steps for what it truly is: an instrument to many more worthwhile ends. And it is only those ends that matter to skeptical EU member states and to people in accession states: more vibrant public debates on political issues, particularly on television. Less discrimination of minorities, whether LGBT or religious minorities. More transparent spending whenever public agencies procure goods and services. A credible strategy to ensure safe food. Environmental inspectorates that ensure that dangerous waste is dealt with appropriately. Less polarised politics. A credible judiciary. Rules for businesses that allow fair competition. And many more…

Take another example. There is an esoteric debate, reminiscent of what scholars discussed in the cathedral schools of medieval Europe, on what is a “functioning market economy” for the European Commission. And in every progress report there is one section on “economic criteria.”

The EU insists that all accession candidates have a functioning market economy before they join: this makes intuitive sense. But the European Commission does not explain how it recognises one. Turkey has a “functioning market economy,” according to the EU. Serbia does not. One could have many long debates on whether a country that is not creditworthy has a functioning market economy (Greece? Cyprus?). Is this status linked to growth or its absence? (Was Finland a functioning market economy in 1988, stopped being one in 1993, and became one again in 1995?)

In fact, I recently learned that some people are trying to take the Commission to court (!) to disclose what its (secret) yardstick for measuring the functionality of an economy is. But it seems a misleading and irrelevant debate. If the Commission WOULD say that Albania will have a “functioning market economy” in 5 years, would members of the Bundestag or the Dutch public believe it? What does withholding this label do for Albania and the EU?

Would it not be better to assess countries by a few clear, measurable, and meaningful outcomes – the results of good economic policy? And to rewrite the currently unreadable and incomprehensible economic sections of progress reports so as to trigger regular and widespread public debates on economic fundamentals?

This could be done by defining and explaining a few key indicators for non-economist readers. Take the employment rate – how many people of working age have worked at least some in the past week, as measured by a credible standardised labor force survey? (Counting people employed in subsistence agriculture – how many of them are among the “employed?” This is also hugely interesting.)  Then one looks a bit closer: if employment is low, is this because few young people work? Or few women?

An accession candidate should focus on these questions, and a progress report by the commission should highlight them, which it does not currently do. In the 2013 Macedonia progress report the authors gave TWO employment rates: 40.7 percent on page 16 and 48.2 percent on page 61, in the same report! (It obviously did not seem central to the authors).

A country that has a low employment rate and yet aims to convince the EU that its economy can, after accession, “withstand competitive pressures” should be asked to show – over the period of the accession process – that it can address this issue seriously, and with at least some success. This is a debate worth having and renewing every year.

The same could be said for other outcomes of economic policy: what about exports per capita, the stock and flow of FDI, the qualifications of the future work force (as measured by the OECD’s PISA tests, which amazingly, not all candidate countries are currently required to participate in), or the ability to spend EU grant money on development?

For most of these outcomes of economic policy there are robust indicators that allow comparisons over time and between countries.  For some the European Commission can easily construct them. Indicators work best if they are completely plausible, and intuitively make sense to a broad public. And there need not be 20. The World Bank’s Doing Business reports started with five in 2004. Better five that every reader can understand, than twenty that are esoteric and hard to grasp.

The same is true for policy areas covered in the chapters. In my Brussels presentation I suggested doing for each chapter – and for each country – what the EU has done in the recent visa liberalisation process: produce one document that clearly sums up what the core requirements are under each policy area (or chapter) that every accession candidate should meet. They could look like visa liberalisation roadmaps (see here examples)

“Core” requirements means that these roadmaps for chapters need not include everything, but rather most of the important criteria – requirements that countries only need to meet shortly before actual accession can be excluded. These requirements should focus on OUTCOMES:  not just to pass a law, but also to “pass a law, have a credible institution and implement it.” And these requirements should be assessed annually in the progress reports for all countries, so they can be compared. There is no reason not to do this in all 7 countries, including Albania and Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo. This would trigger very healthy debates and competition everywhere. In this way the annual progress report of the European Commission, its sections on “economic criteria” and on the policy areas in the 33 chapters, would become readable, interesting, and useful. It would address all four strategic objectives:

  • Fairness: Regular fair public assessments of where accession countries really stand in terms of meeting EU criteria.
  • Strictness: Strict public assessment of where accession countries are failing or even falling behind. The more concrete and specific the assessments are of what is missing, the better.
  • Clarity: Any EU assessment needs to be understood, not just by a handful of experts, but by the broader interested public in accession countries and in the EU. (Sections that are incomprehensible to an interested non-expert should be cut and rewritten).
  • Comparability: Any assessment should encourage two types of comparisons: between the situation in accession countries and EU standards, and among accession countries. Comparisons help both the fairness and the strictness of assessments.  They encourage friendly competition and mutual learning from best practice.

ESI believes that the regular progress reports – published annually by the European Commission on every applicant country already now – are the obvious and best instrument to achieve all of these objectives. Improving them is rightly at the center of any debate on how to increase the impact and credibility of current enlargement policy.

We are convinced that, building on what the Commission is already doing, progress reports could easily have the same impact on reform debates and reforms in accession countries as the regular OECD Pisa reports have had. Since 2000 these have reshaped the global debate on education.

This would help the Commission to keep (or regain) the trust in its assessments, which it needs to be effective.

In the end, the success of the commission in the field of enlargement cannot be measured by formal criteria: how many countries have started accession talks or how many chapters have been opened is not what matters most. What matters is closing chapters. And this can only happen after reforms are implemented. This means what matters now is what best helps the reform process.

 

BRUSSELS PRESENTATION

Below are a few slides from my Brussels presentation. In the next weeks we are planning to organise many more presentations across Europe. We integrate the feedback into the next presentations and policy papers. If you have thoughts on this, please do let us know: you can write directly to g.knaus@esiweb.org.

One reason PISA tests capture the public imagination: they make it possible to compare results between countries and over time. But the ranking is not a gimmick for the media: the results also allow detailed analysis, such as what kind of schools are doing better than others? Are there differences between reading and science results? Between girls and boys? How significant are the discrepancies between the best and the worst performing schools?

A notable strength of PISA is that it focused on results, not perceptions. DG enlargement needs the same. A credible yardstick – a gripping, readable annual report – would achieve all of these goals. The progress reports should be this:


This requires that all parts of the reports be read, understood, and taken seriously by at least the following members of a focus group: the civil servants who work on it, political leaders in government and opposition, business people who care about EU accession for what it means for them, critical journalists, civil society activists, and interested followers of the news, who might be tempted to look for a translation of the report.

See below a possible focus group in Macedonia: this IS the readership of these reports in any country.

At the same time EU member states need to see what is being done.

There are three parts to progress reports, where different ways of assessment are needed:

Political criteria: A focus on outcomes and areas where countries fall short. This is NOT likely to be usefully measured in quantitative terms, but best by reference to minimum standards, (which need not be low, but should be plausible). More on this in the next ESI reports.

Economic criteria: A focus on plausible OUTCOMES of good policy, a mere handful of key and obvious indicators.

Alignment with EU policies and regulations in sectors: The production – for the 33 chapters – of roadmaps would help because it would allow turning implementation into scorecards. This WAS done for visa liberalisation:

The key is how to identify core objectives in each policy field. The expertise for most or all of the policy fields currently exists in the Commission, as does the text.

This would then also allow comparisons. And this in turn would inspire debates, allow leaders to focus, and allow the media to analyse … it would put the results of the process – not the formal opening of closing of chapters – at the center of attention.

Rethinking the methods of assessment would also allow countries to make real efforts to try to beat low expectations… and to know that this would be recognised. It would allow certain ministers in a government to stand out. This is what happened to Bosnia during the visa liberalisation process in the summer of 2010. (See below the scorecard before and after this real effort).

At the same time, this would allow critical member states to understand in detail HOW the European Commission arrives at its assessments.

All this leads to a few concrete suggestions for EU accession future progress reports:

  • Precise formulations (even more so than today, though in 2013 this was already done)
  • In assessing “alignment” (or “preparation”) consider moving towards terms that more clearly indicate the required end-state: “Fully met,” “Largely met,” and “Not yet met.”
  • Build each chapter assessment on publicly available individual chapter roadmaps, which also list the indicators used to assess implementation.
  • Add scorecards for each chapter
  • Report on all seven countries in the same way so they can be compared.
  • Consider adjusting chapter roadmaps every three years in light of the changing EU acquis.

Scorecard legend for the table below:

Green: alignment is/preparations are advanced / well advanced / rather advanced / relatively advanced; high / sufficient level of alignment)

Yellow: alignment is/ preparations are advancing / moderately advanced / on track

Red: alignment is/ preparations are starting / at an early stage / not very advanced / not yet sufficient. / A country has started to address its priorities in this area.

Alignment with the acquis – per chapter – 2013 Progress Reports

 

Chapter

Turkey

Mace-donia

Serbia

Monte-negro

Albania

1: Free movement of goods

3

3

1

3

1

2: FoM for workers

0

0

1

0

0

3: Right of establishment, freedom to provide services

0

1

1

0

1

4: Free movement of capital

0

1

1

1

1

5: Public procurement

1

3

1

1

1

6: Company law

3

1

3

1

1

7: Intellectual property law

3

1

3

3

0

8: Competition policy

1

3

1

1

0

9: Financial services

3

1

1

1

1

10: Information society & media

1

1

1

1

1

11: Agriculture & rural development

0

1

0

0

0

12: Food safety

0

1

1

0

0

13: Fisheries

0

1

1

0

0

14: Transport policy

1

1

1

3

0

15: Energy

3

1

1

1

0

16: Taxation

1

1

1

1

1

17: Economic & monetary policy

3

3

1

1

0

18: Statistics

3

3

3

1

1

19: Social policy & employment

1

0

0

0

0

20: Enterprise & industrial policy

3

1

1

0

1

21: Trans-European networks

3

3

1

1

0

22: Regional policy, structural instr.

1

0

1

0

1

23: Judiciary & fundamental  rights

24: Justice, freedom & security

0

3

1

1

1

25: Science & research

3

1

1

1

0

26: Education & culture

1

1

1

3

1

27: Environment & climate change

0

1

0

0

0

28: Consumer & health protection

1

1

1

1

0

29: Customs union

3

3

1

1

1

30: External relations

3

1

1

1

1

31:Foreign, security, defence policy

1

3

1

1

1

32: Financial control

1

0

1

1

1

33: Financial & budgetary prov.

0

0

0

0

0

 

 

Detailed assessment by the European Commission (2013)

Chapter

Turkey

Macedonia

Serbia

Montenegro

Albania

1: Free movement of goods

The state of alignment in this chapter is advanced.

Preparations in the area of free movement of goods are advanced.

Preparations in the area of free movement of goods are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of free movement of goods are relatively advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

2: Freedom of movement for workers

Preparations in this area are at an early stage.

Preparations in this area are still at an early stage.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Alignment with the acquis is still at an early stage.

Preparations in the area of freedom of movement for workers are at an early stage.

3: Right of establishment and freedom to provide services

Alignment is at an early stage.

In the area of postal services, the level of alignment is advanced. There is not yet full alignment with the acquis, particularly as regards mutual recognition of professional qualifications, free movement of services and establishment.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

Substantial efforts are still needed to align the legislation and implement the acquis on mutual recognition of professional qualifications.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

4: Free movement of capital

Preparations in this area are at an early stage.

Preparations are on track and gradual harmonisation of the regulatory framework for payment systems is under way.

Alignment in this area is moderately advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

5: Public procurement

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of public procurement are advanced.

Alignment in the area of public procurement is moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of public procurement are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the field of public procurement are moderately advanced.

6: Company law

Turkey is well advanced in this area.

Preparations in the area of company law as a whole are moderately advanced.

Alignment in the area of corporate law is well advanced.

Preparations remain moderately advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

7: Intellectual property law

Alignment with the acquis is advanced.

Preparations in the field of IPR are moderately advanced.

Alignment in the area of IPL is advanced.

Preparations are advanced.

Preparations are not very advanced.

8: Competition policy

Turkey is moderately advanced in this area.

Preparations in this area are advanced.

Alignment in this area is moderately advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

Preparations for the revision of state aid legislation are at an early stage.

9: Financial services

Preparations in the area of financial

services are advanced.

Alignment with key parts of the acquis on financial market infrastructure has not yet been achieved. In the area of financial services, alignment with the acquis is moderately advanced.

Alignment in the area of financial services is moderately advanced.

The level of alignment is moderately advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

10: Information society and media

Preparations are moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are on track.

Alignment with the

acquis in this area remains moderately advanced.

Preparations are on track.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

11: Agriculture and rural development

Preparations in the area of agriculture and rural development are at an early stage.

Preparations remain moderately advanced.

Alignment with the acquis remains at an early stage.

Alignment with the acquis is at an early stage.

Preparations in this area are not very advanced.

12: Food safety, veterinary and phytosanitary policy

Preparations in this area are at an early stage.

Preparations in the area of food safety and veterinary policy are well on track. Preparations in the phytosanitary area are at an early stage.

Preparations in the area of food safety, veterinary and phytosanitary policy are moderately advanced.

Preparations remain at an early stage.

Preparations remain at an early stage.

13: Fisheries

Alignment in this area is at an early stage.

A large proportion of the fisheries acquis is not relevant as the country is landlocked.

Preparations in the area of fisheries are moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are at an early stage.

Preparations are not very advanced.

14: Transport policy

In the area of transport, Turkey is moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Serbia is moderately advanced in its alignment with the acquis in this area.

Preparations in this area are advanced.

Preparations in the area of transport are not very advanced.

15: Energy

Turkey is at a rather advanced level of alignment in the field of energy.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of energy are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of energy are moderately advanced.

Preparations are not very advanced.

16: Taxation

Preparations in this chapter are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of taxation are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of taxation are moderately advanced.

Montenegro’s alignment with the acquis is moderately advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

17: Economic and monetary policy

Turkey’s level of preparedness is advanced.

Preparations in this area are advanced.

Serbia is moderately advanced.

Alignment in the area of economic and monetary policy is moderately advanced.

Preparations are not yet sufficient.

18: Statistics

Alignment with the acquis is at an advanced level.

Preparations in the field of statistics are advanced.

Serbia is advanced in the area of statistics.

Preparations in the area of statistics are moderately advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

19: Social policy and employment

Legal alignment is moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are at an early stage.

Serbia has started to address its priorities in this area.

Montenegro has started to address its priorities in this area.

Preparations in the area of social policy and employment are not very advanced.

20: Enterprise and industrial policy

Turkey has a sufficient level of alignment in this chapter.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are on track.

A strategic effort to promote skills at all levels in sectors where Montenegro has significant trade with the EU will be important to improve competitiveness and ensure preparedness for competitive pressures and market forces within the Union.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

21: Trans-European networks

Alignment in this chapter is advanced.

Preparations in this area are advanced.

Preparations in the area of trans-European networks are moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of trans-European networks are not very advanced.

22: Regional policy and coordination of structural instruments

Preparations in this area are

moderately advanced.

Preparations in

this area are not very advanced.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are at an early stage.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

23: Judiciary and fundamental rights

24: Justice, freedom and security

Alignment in the area of justice and home affairs is at an early stage.

Preparations in this area are advanced.

Serbia is moderately advanced in the area of justice, freedom and security.

Alignment with the acquis in the field of legal migration, asylum and visas is still at an early stage.

Preparations in this field are advancing.

25: Science and research

Turkey is well prepared in this area.

Preparations in this area are on track.

Preparations in the area of science and research are on track.

Preparations in this area are well on track.

Preparations are not sufficiently advanced.

26: Education and culture

(No assessment of the state of alignment.)

Preparations in the areas of education and culture are moderately advanced.

Preparations for aligning with EU standards are moderately advanced.

Preparations are advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

27: Environment and climate change

Preparations in these fields are at an early stage.

Preparations in the field of the environment are moderately advanced while preparations in the field of climate change remain at an early stage.

Priorities in the fields of environment and climate change have started to be addressed.

Preparations in these areas are still at an early stage.

Preparations in the fields of the environment and climate change are at an early stage.

28: Consumer and health protection

Preparations in this area are on track.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area remain moderately advanced.

Preparations in these areas are moderately advanced.

Preparations are starting.

29: Customs union

The level of alignment in this area remains high.

Preparations in this area are advanced.

Preparations in the area of the customs union are well on track.

Preparations in the field of customs union are moderately advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

30: External relations

There is a high level of alignment in this area.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of external relations are moderately advanced.

Preparations in the area of external relations are on track.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

31: Foreign, security and defence policy

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are well advanced.

Preparations in the area of foreign, security and defence policy are well on track.

Preparations in the area of foreign, security and defence policy are on track.

Preparations in this field remain on track.

32: Financial control

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are at an early stage.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations in this area are moderately advanced.

Preparations are moderately advanced.

33: Financial and budgetary provisions

Preparations in this area are at an early stage.

Preparations are at an early stage.

Preparations in this field are at an early stage.

Preparations in this area are at an early stage.

Preparations in the area of financial and budgetary provisions are at an early stage.

Oped in Koha Ditore: One decade has been lost. What about the next one?

One decade has been lost. What about the next one?

Op-ed by Gerald Knaus (for Koha Ditore)

 

In Athens, spring 2003

 

One decade ago, in spring 2003, the New York Times published an appeal by four Balkan leaders, the presidents of Croatia and Macedonia and the prime ministers of Albania and Serbia. Its title: “The EU and South-East Europe need each other.”[1] The occasion was a special Balkan meeting of the World Economic Forum in Athens where all these leaders also came together.

I was there too at the time, and I remember both the appeal and the atmosphere in Athens well. In fact, together with my friend Misha Glenny, I drafted it. There was a sense of urgency in the air, and of anticipation. Zoran Djindic, the prime minister of Serbia who had delivered Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague tribunal, had been assassinated by ultra-nationalist members of the Serbian security forces. Croatia had handed in its application to join the EU, the first Western Balkan state to do so. The host of the meeting, Greece, then the EU’s rotating president, pushed hard to get a European commitment to continued Balkan enlargement.

Shortly before the Athens gathering Boris Trajkovski, the president of Macedonia, invited me to draft an appeal that he planned to ask other leaders to co-sign. He knew that the region would receive a better hearing if it spoke with one voice. He was concerned. His own country had recently been on the verge of civil war. Serbia was on the edge, its ultranationalists growing in confidence. The future of Montenegro and Kosovo was not yet settled. Would the EU, following its 2004 enlargement to Central Europe – then just about to happen – get tired of further expansion? The Balkan leaders’ appeal warned: “Until the whole Southeastern Europe is safely integrated into the European Union, the job will not be complete. And until it is, Europe cannot feel secure about itself.”

One decade later, where do we stand? Today, when EU leaders talk about crises in South-East Europe they think of Athens not Skopje, of Nikosia, not Belgrade. Europe does not feel “secure about itself” but it is not the Western Balkans or the threat of renewed conflict that keeps EU leaders awake, literally, at one crisis summit after another.

Montenegro and Kosovo are independent states; the fear of armed conflict in the region has never appeared more distant. And yet, despite these important breakthroughs, it is hard not to regard the years since 2003 as a lost decade for the Balkans. Boris Trajkovski tragically died in an airplane crash in the Bosnian mountains, on his way to submit Macedonia’s own application for EU membership. His country has been stalled for years now by a Greek veto (a threat which did not appear real in 2003 in Athens). Serbia, ten years after the death of Djindic, has still not even opened EU accession talks. Albania is not an EU candidate yet. The Greek foreign minister in spring 2003, George Papandreou, became prime minister, only to be swept away by the Greek economic melt-down. 2003 was perhaps the last success of Greek diplomacy. At the European Union summit on the Balkans in Thessaloniki in summer EU leaders stated their “unequivocal support to the European perspective of the Western Balkan countries. The future of the Balkans is within the European Union.”[2] Croatia used the past decade, opened accession talks, closed them, and is today on the verge of accession. And yet, it is likely that ten years from now in 2023 Croatia will still be the only Balkan country inside the EU.

Rereading the Trajkovski appeal today highlights a further disappointment. It contained a specific proposal: to make EU regional and cohesion funding available to the region, so as to help it catch up economically, rather than fall further behind. The appeal warned that “the long-term stability of Southeastern Europe depends on the region’s economic health, but this does not mean the usual plea for more money … We are committed to opening our markets to our neighbors and to the EU. We have made huge progress in curbing inflation. And we are now greatly encouraged by the proposal by Greece … that the Thessaloniki summit meeting focus on the possibility of applying cohesion and development policies in our region.”

This was a hope that has not come true. The Western Balkans remains one of the poorest regions of Europe. In Serbia today less than half of the working-age population is actually employed. Unemployment levels in Macedonia and Bosnia are disastrously high. Foreign direct investment in the region, which had transformed the economic structures of Central European countries, has fallen to very low levels. And yet, if a focus on underdevelopment in the Balkans has never been more urgent, the EU’s confidence in its ability to bring about convergence and growth in its own periphery has rarely been lower. The 2003 Trajkovski appeal stated that “The EU has a remarkable record of triggering economic success by helping poorer regions — Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal have experienced veritable revolutions in social and economic development in the last 20 years.” It is hard to imagine anybody writing like this today, in the wake of bail-outs, bank failures and rapidly rising unemployment in Spain or Greece.

EU leaders no longer worry about war in the Balkans. They are no longer confident in their ability to bring about economic convergence. They fear the weakness of democratic institutions in Romania or Greece. They worry about inadequate regulation in Cyprus or Spain. Given this state of affairs: what arguments can sway them to open their institutions to accept even poorer states, with even weaker institutions, and even worse images among the public and political elites in Berlin, Paris or The Hague?

Perhaps Greece will prepare for its EU presidency in 2014 by changing its policies on Skopje and Pristina.  Perhaps Serbia and Kosovo will soon reach an agreement that allows both countries to move beyond their confrontation. Perhaps Albania will manage to hold free and fair elections this summer. Perhaps Bosnia’s leaders will soon be able to put together a credible application for EU accession. Perhaps Macedonia’s leaders will be capable of renewing the national consensus to focus on EU integration that existed in 2003. Perhaps politicians throughout the region will wake up late at night worrying about youth unemployment and the inadequacy of vocational training, about export opportunities and the best way to use scarce public resources for growth, rather than about building  statutes or wasting public money on prestige infrastructure of little proven economic benefit. And then, perhaps, a successor of Boris Trajkovski will invite all his regional counterparts to an informal meeting to seriously discuss what they might do together to correct the image of their region, driven by the recognition that the whole region has dropped out of the focus of the rest of Europe.

If Boris Trajkovski would be around today, and would propose drafting a new appeal for Balkan leaders to sign and publish, what could it say? Appeals are expected to end with proposals, a sense of hope, recommendations. But sometimes it is better to resist this temptation. To acknowledge just how steep the wall is that one has to climb. To recognise that before any new appeals to the EU a whole series of steps have to be taken by the region itself. To recognise that time matters; and that April 2013 is another crucial moment which Balkan leaders miss at their peril. I believe Trajkovski would have realised this. Will his successors?

Perhaps this is not a time for appeals at all, but for a blunt and honest recognition: a decade has been lost. The next might be as well. And it is not by formulating words on paper that this can be prevented.


The Balkan employment catastrophy. A joint appeal with Kori Udovicki

Kori Udovicki Leskovac
Kori Udovicki (UNDP) – Declining industries in Leskovac

 

Media reactions to this appeal:

 

Kori Udovicki, a former Governor of the National Bank of Serbia and former Minister of Energy, who had worked as an economist for the IMF and had set up and run an economic think tank in Belgrade, has since 2007 been Assistant Secretary-General and Assistant Administrator of UNDP responsible for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). We  met a few times in recent months to discuss economic development issues in the Balkans: in New York, in Paris and most recently in Bruges. As we talked we quickly discovered that we shared a very similar approach to these issues, even though we looked at them from different perspectives and experiences.

As Kori told me, after a long career as a macroeconomist, with a PhD in economics from Yale under her belt, she had grown increasingly sceptical about the conventional economic policy advise that had been offered to Balkan countries in recent years. It is not that this advise is not sound, but that it is dangerously limited. Yes, macroeconomic stability is important, crucial even. Yes, privatisation and indeed liquidation of loss making companies was needed (and indeed often took much too long in the Balkans). And yes, it cannot harm if it is easier and quicker to register a new business. But these prescriptions alone will not be enough to create the jobs and reverse a disastrous process of deindustrialisation from which the Balkan region has suffered in the past two decades.

I had long felt the same, and this sense of unease was recently reinforced after a conference debating economic policy in the region in the wake of the global financial crisis organised by the Central Bank of Greece in Athens. There, in the presence of governors of Central Banks from across South East Europe, numerous speakers pointed out the need to rethink the current growth model in the region. They warned that what had happened in recent years, consumer credit driven growth, was not going to work in the future.  And yet, there remained a vagueness in the debate about an alternative and yet credible approach to growth.

And so Kori and myself put our heads together, debated, discussed and sent drafts across the atlantic to produce something we called an “appeal” concerning the employment crisis in the Balkans. This text benefitted hugely from debates with and research undertaken by my ESI colleagues, in this case in particular Kristof Bender and Eggert Hardten. It also benefitted from feedback at a seminar at the College d’Europe recently in Bruges, where I had been invited to present ideas to the senior staff of UNDP working in South East Europe. Above all it benefitted from the long debates, continued over skype, with Kori.

We certainly hope that this will be a useful and provocative small contribution to an inportant topic; one that concerns arguably the biggest structural threat to a lasting stabilisation of the Balkans.

 

The Balkan Employment Crisis—an urgent appeal

(Oped by Kori Udovicki and Gerald Knaus)

Leskovac, once known as the Serbian Manchester, is home to a textile industry that began in the 19th century, flourished under communism, and survives – albeit barely – till today. The town, which lies in the south of Serbia, boasts a textile school (set up in 1947), an association of textile engineers, and its very own textile magazine. The boom years are a distant memory, however. Leskovac’s socialist-era companies are bankrupt, their production halls empty, their machines dismantled and sold as scrap metal.

In the past two decades Leskovac has seen its population decline from 162,000 (1991) to less than 140,000. The drop in the working-age population has been disproportionately
high, and unemployment has increased. At the heart of the town’s plight, and that of so many other regions in the Western Balkans, is the impact of dramatic de-industrialization.

Contemporary Serbia is a society whose population is both aging (with an average age of 41, it is one of the oldest in the world) and shrinking.   So is its industry.  A recent article in the local press cites that 98 large, complex, industrial companies have shut down over the past two decades. And, most worrisomely, so is total employment.  After stagnating throughout the economic recovery of the 2000s, it has been sharply declining since 2008.  Today the employment rate is down to about 45 per cent, more than 20 per cent below the EU average.  Half of the young are unemployed.  In the textile and clothing sector, the number of workers has collapsed from 160,000 in 1990 to around 40,000 in 2010.

Serbia’s textile industry is representative of much of its industry, and Serbia’s labor market trends are representative of those in all the post-Yugoslav states.  The employment rate in Albania is also one of the lowest in Europe.

It is true that Europe’s textile industry has been put on the defensive by the emerging Far East.  However, it would be wrong to conclude that Serbia’s textile industry’s decline has been inevitable. In recent decades, the sector – one of the most highly globalized in the world – has seen employment shift from Germany to Poland, from Hong Kong to China, from Italy to Hungary and Turkey, and then to Bulgaria and Romania. In many peripheral regions across South East Europe, textiles have been a recent locomotive of growth and exports, creating hundreds of thousands of low-skilled jobs. The question we need to ask is why so few of these jobs have found their way to the Western Balkans.  Bulgaria was able to increase its exports in the textile and clothing sector from 280 million USD to more than 2 billion US between 1990 and 2010, contributing more than 100,000 industrial jobs.  Why hasn’t this been possible in Serbia, Bosnia or Albania? The same questions could be asked about other industries in the Balkans. Why are there more than 10,000 jobs in the furniture industry in the Central Anatolian city of Kayseri, far from any woods, but not in Bosnia and Herzegovina? Why are household appliance producers doing well in Slovenia, Western Romania and Western Anatolia, but not in the Western Balkans? How about agro-processing for the EU market? And what about Bosnia’s armaments industry, the mainstay of its industry in the past? Was its collapse really inevitable?

One answer is that the growth model adopted in the Western Balkans over the last decade has discouraged governments from asking such specific questions. Driven by distrust of the legacy of socialist planning, as well as by fear of state capture by corrupt businesses and corruption in the administration, the preferred economic policies have been hands-off, focusing not on specific sectors of the economy but on the general business environment. Policymakers have been praised for avoiding the temptation to shield declining areas of the economy from the discipline of the market. At the same time they found it hard to acknowledge when many former socialist businesses were past the point of possible recovery, overburdened by their debts and in urgent need of liquidation. Neither the political debates nor the legal framework in the region acknowledged that liquidation, sometimes, is the best way to ensure that existing resources—people and capital—remain in use, by being re-employed in the new growing private sector.

These key ingredients of the standard recipes of economic policy in the past decade are important, of course: a stable macroeconomic environment and a good business climate, in
which it is easier to open and close businesses, are a necessary condition for sustained recovery.  But they are not sufficient. In a region ravaged by conflict and the sheer length of economic decline, a policy mix of “hands-off”, “rules-based” privatization and deregulation cannot be sufficient to launch sustained economic recovery. Even during the periods of relative economic growth and high FDI inflows, the employment generated by the new, entrepreneurial private sector was not sufficient to offset the jobs shed by the slowly restructuring and privatized old industries. The financial crisis of 2008 has wiped out more than the jobs generated in the recovery period, even if informal job generation is taken into
account.

While the recovery lasted, there was a hope that FDI would yet accelerate and begin to generate more employment.  Now, however, it is clear that the growth model needs to be changed.  This has been noted by international institutions, most explicitly the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). More importantly, regional policymakers, under increasing pressure to generate jobs, have begun reaching for desperate measures, such as large, blanket, subsidies for foreign investors.  This is the kind of step that has so often in the past given industrial policy a bad name.

What would an alternative model of economic growth look like? In answering this question, it helps to keep in mind that there is not, in fact, one simple answer.  Each time, the answer depends on the context. Clearly, the key is the inclusion into global chains of industrial production.  Credible industrial policies are needed to define ways of encouraging the mobile global investments to those sectors – from food processing to clothing, from furniture to basic engineering assembly – where declining industrial regions in the Balkans possess a comparative advantage. For this one needs a better understanding of the drivers behind the industrial jobs that are already being generated.  In Leskovac, for example, over the past five years new jobs have been linked to investments by companies from Germany, South Korea and Turkey.

The question then becomes: what could be done to turn the trickle into a flood?  Comparative advantages are likely to be still hiding in the remnants of the past. Declining industries have left behind redundant workers and educational institutions without the skills and resources needed to adjust to a new marketplace. Provincial cities like Leskovac lack foreign contacts.   However, the right initiatives and support can deliver the necessary resources at a fraction of the costs that it would take to create a conducive environment “from scratch”.

A competent industrial development agency, modelled, for example, on the Irish Industrial Development Agency (IRA) could do this job.  The key word here is “competent”. It would have to be able to offer support and advice – based on credible and painstaking sectoral analysis – to local administrations and companies.  It would need to help educate local governments about ways of attracting investors.  It could also offer grants for private sector management training, to enable their companies to move up the value chain in
different sectors of production.

This is not an easy task. However, there is no reason to assume that such competence in the Western Balkans could not be put together and built up. For this, however, it is necessary, that a new philosophy for the role of industrial policy in economic growth be embraced.  This can only be done by the policymakers and governments of the countries themselves.

The EU could also help, however. All too often in the past two decades, the message coming across from EU officials and international financial institutions has, instead, been one of blanket discouragement of government intervention. The EU could do more to support the countries’ ability to develop and pursue credible multiyear strategies in a whole range of sectors, including agriculture and rural development, transportation, environment, and regional development. During the last enlargement wave, each candidate country integrated such strategies into a National Development Plan (NDP), which functioned both as a national roadmap and as a programming document for EU assistance. Such an approach would benefit the countries of the Western Balkans, where the public sector suffers from a dearth of planning capacity and resources for policy development.

Last but not least, the credibility of Western Balkan integration into the EU market could be enhanced. For the Western Balkans, the last few years have seen agonizingly slow progress in this area, with no country other than Croatia having so much as opened EU accession talks. The more realistic the perspective of EU membership for countries such as Serbia or Albania, the bigger the incentives for those interested in long-term investments in industrial production in the Balkans.

Integration with the EU market will be a critical anchor for economic development in the Balkans, but it will take more to ensure convergence. The example of Greece shows that
integration and access to funds is not enough. Greece is currently not able to absorb more than a third of EU structural and cohesion policy funding, because it has never benefited from the massive capacity-building and institutional support that has been given to the Fifth enlargement countries and Croatia. Looking on to the Western Balkan batch, the EU may consider increasing this support, emphasizing the administrative capacity for medium-term development in policy planning and coordination. Bringing development planning
into an earlier stage of the current accession process would allow each Balkan country to focus on the assessment of its competitiveness in agriculture and industry, and learn about the  constraints to development faced by these sectors.

None of this is to suggest that there is a silver bullet for job creation. The Balkan development challenge is enormous, and there are deep structural reasons behind the staggeringly low rates of employment in the region – some reaching back into the 1980s and the very nature of socialist industrialisation. Reversing the long-term trend of employment decline is a generational project, made all the more difficult by the current cyclical conditions in Europe. But reindustrialisation has taken place in recent years in a number of new member states or candidates, from Poland to Slovakia. Numerous industrial development clusters – from Timisoara in Western Romania to the Istanbul region and many Anatolian tiger cities in Turkey – have seen growth and success. In all these cases, political elites at the national and local level have made the integration of local businesses into global chains of industrial production a strategic priority.

The lack of employment opportunities today in the Western Balkans is generating quiet despair, especially among the young.  Without radical change, without a serious and visible commitment to a new set of policies, the sense if despair now palpable in the region may become burning.  There is, in fact, no greater, more urgent, social and economic issue in the Balkans. Fortunately, experiences of successful industrial recoveries and turnarounds abound.  Learning from them could turn around the fate of people in Leskovac, and countless other towns just like it.

The march of Balkan history? – Gerald Knaus 5th October presentation

On 5th October I was invited to the anniversary conference commemorating the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia one decade ago. It was a thought-provoking gathering with a wide range of speakers: Serbian president Boris Tadic, Bozidar Djelic, Mikulas Dzurinda, Vuk Jeremic, Eduard Kukan, George Papandreou, Francois Heissbourg, Goran Svilanovic, Pavol Demes and others.

I also gave a presentation, a short version of arguments my colleagues and I are developing fully for a forth-coming ESI paper on the Balkans – any feedback at this stage is very welcome!


Belgrade, 5th October 2010

Dear friends,

It is a great privilege and pleasure for me to come to Belgrade on this special occasion, to look back at an eventful decade with so many friends, to take stock, to take heart, and to share ideas about the lessons the recent past holds for all of us, interested in democratisation in general and in South East Europe in particular.

At the same time this event is more than a celebration of the breakthrough in October 2000. It finds many of us impatient; it is not merely, or even mainly, an occasion to rejoice in what has been achieved, but more importantly a chance to assess what still needs to be done. In recent months we have all come across symptoms of “Balkan fatigue” in many quarters, a sense of frustration that things are not moving along faster.

So let me take a closer look today at some causes behind the impatience many of us feel; at some specific challenges the Balkan region faces in realising the vision of a “return to Europe” that president Tadic outlined at the opening of today’s event; and in particular at the role, policies and responsibilities of the European Union.

Battle of ideas

There are different ways to convey how far the region, and Europe as a whole, has come since the 1990s. One is to focus on the battle of ideas. So here are two prominent European thinkers looking at the Balkans in the first half of the 1990s. One is French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In 1994 he published an article in the Belgrade paper Borba, under the titel “Without Pity”. There he argued, against the background of the war in Bosnia, that “all European countries are going the way of ethnic cleansing. That is the real Europe … Bosnia is only its new frontier.” Two years earlier an Irish writer, Conor Cruise o’Brien, had offered an equally glommy take on the Balkans. He wrote in 1992:

“There are places where a lot of men prefer war, and the looting and raping and domineering that go with it, to any sort of peace time occupation. One such place is Afghanistan. Another is Yugoslavia …”

These deeply pessimistic visions, arguing either that the whole edifice of post-World War II European civilisation was brittle, and all of Europe was doomer to a “normality” of clashes of civilisation and ethnic hatred OR that, at the very least, Balkan people and societies belonged to a different, pre-modern world distinct from the “civilised” rest of Europe, were actually widely shared in the 1990s … not only in Belgrade or Zagreb, but also in Paris, London, Athens and elsewhere in the EU. This also explains how it was possible for a UN general, Canadian Major General Louis MacKenzie, head of the UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, to tell the US congress in May 1993 that the law of the jungle was the true law of humanity: “Force has been rewarded since the first caveman picked up a club, occupied his neighbour’s cave, and ran off with his wife.” This explains how it was possible for Karadzic and Mladic to be welcomed as heros in Athens in the early 1990s. It explains why some leaders thought that the most “realistic” response to the Balkan tragedy was to let events run its “natural” course. If soft power is the ability to get others to want what you want, then European soft power in the 1990s suffered from the obvious: that it was not clear what Europe wanted.

Ideas matter. Nationalist ideas. Ideas of Balkan exceptionalism. Erik Hobsbawm has underlined that intellectuals are to national movements what”poppy growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts – the suppliers of the raw material for the market.” There were many such poppy growers, mainly but not only, in the Balkans. They prepared the ground, first for the disastrous wars of the 90s, then for the failures to stop them.

At the same time during the 1990s the notion of a “return to Europe” was a complex one. There was a time, not long ago, when “Europe” did not stand for values of democratic governance and peaceful interdependence: when, as historian Mark Mazower reminds us in Dark Continent, European civilisation was not actually tending towards democracy. Mazower writes that “though we may like to think democracy’s victory in the cold war proves its deep roots in Europe’s soil, history tells us otherwise. Triumphant in 1918, it was virtually extinct twenty years on.” There is a strong non-democratic, nationalist, militaristic and authoritarian 20th century European tradition, and it is one that Balkan leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic could refer to when they stressed the supposed debt Europe owed to Serbia. As he put it in his infamous 1989 speech in Kosovo Polje, he too was in favour of a “return to Europe”:

“Six centuries ago, here on Kosovo field, Serbia defended herself. But she defended also Europe. She stood then on the rampart of Europe, defending European culture, religion, European society as a whole. That is why today it seems no only unjustified, but also unhistorical and completely absurd to question Serbia’s belonging to Europe.”

Of course, after world war II Western Europe embraced other values. The question in the 1990s was in which European tradition Serbia and other Balkan countries saw themselves: the first or the second half of the 20th century. The Central Europeans made a clear choice in 1989. The results were dramatic. In 1990 the number of Poles who feared Germany was above 80 percent. By 2009 it had fallen to 14 percent. After 1989 the goal of joining an integrating democratic continent spread across the whole of Central Europe. And in October 2000, on the day we remember today, it finally became realistic to imagine that the same ideas would be embraced across the whole of the Western Balkans as well. It was also a major breakthrough in the battle of ideas.

October 2000 was followed by the EU Balkan Zagreb summit in 2000. There and then the EU stated that it “reaffirms the European perspective of the countries” of the Western Balkans. This was an interesting way of bracketing the disastrous 1990s, in which few people – in the region and in the EU – had spent much time to think about this vision. This was in turn re-reaffirmed in the Thessaloniki Agenda for the Western Balkans in 2003 when the European Council “reiterated that the future of the Western Balkans is within the European Union”. Then the 2006 EU Salzburg Declaration noted: “the EU confirms that the future of the Western Balkans lies in the European Union.” Affirmed, reaffirmed, confirmed … the story of EU-Balkan relations in the decade since 2000 is the story of an increasingly dominant narrative, in which, officially, the future of the whole region is clear and settled. There would only be one Europe, and the Balkans were destined to be part of it.

The advantage of this kind of vision is that it leaves little space for alternative, and often dangerous, ideas. To be able to predict the future of a whole region reduces uncertainty and fear. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Sweden’s Carl Bildt wrote in Le Figaro in 2008, for instance, that: “it is certain that Serbia will soon be a member of the EU, because there is no alternative. This is in tune with the march of history.” Lady Ashton, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, told civil society representatives in Belgrade in February this year that “the EU is determined that the future of the whole region lies in eventual accession to the EU.”

Malaise

So far, so good. However, if the direction of the “march of history” is clear, why is there such a feeling of unease across the whole region today? Is it really only because leaders in the region are not doing enough to reform their countries, which is a herculean task that will take more time? Or are there deeper reasons for concern?

In a recent book on Europe 2030, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, a big supporter of enlargement when in office, presented his personal view that the future of enlargement is grim: “while almost all of the EU’s neighbours wish to join, its own citizens increasingly oppose not only further expansion but also deeper political integration.” Fischer sees no happy end soon: instead, the spectre is of a Balkan accession process which will never end. He concludes:

“I doubt that Europe’s malaise can be overcome before 2030 … While the partial creation of a common defense system, along with a European army, is possible by 2030, a common foreign policy is not. Expansion of the EU to include the Balkan states, Turkey and Ukraine should also be ruled out.”

Fischer’s expectations echo and reflect the general debate in political circles in Berlin. We all remember the statement in the CDU election programme of 2009, which called for a “enlargement pause”:

“The enlargement of the EU from 15 to 27 members within a few years … has required great efforts. As a result the CDU prefers a phase of consolidation, during which a consolidation of the European Union’s values and institutions should take priority over further EU enlargement. The only exception to the rule can be for Croatia.”

Unfortunately, even at the time these were not just words: in March 2009 Germany – backed by Belgium and the Netherlands – blocked forwarding the application of Montenegro to the European Commission for an opinion. This had in the past been a mere technical step. And this, once established as a precedent, has now been repeated in the case of Serbia. Signals from Berlin today are that this could be overcome soon … but what to expect from the next government in The Hague, now dependend on the a good will of a politician, Geert Wilders, who told Euronews in 2009 that “no other country should join Europe. I’m even in favour of Romania and Bulgaria to leave [sic] the EU” ?

In the 1990s, in the streets of Belgrade in 2000, it was clear what supporters of a European democratic Balkans had to struggle against. Today the alternative ideologies inspired by early 20th century Europe have largely been defeated; the region has dramatically demobilised, cutting defense spending and ending conscription; key political actors everywhere have embraced the rhetoric of a European future for the Balkans. So has the EU, its leaders repeating the mantra at every gathering for a decade.

And yet, enormous uncertainties persists. As a very senior European official working on the Balkans told me just a few weeks ago:

“I do not know if the EU perspective is 10 or 100 years. I am selling 10, but in my heart of hearts I do not know if it is not in fact 100.”

If this is what people in the EU, working on the region, feel, one cannot blame people in the Balkans for wondering how certain their European future really is. This is the current EU-Balkan problem in a nutshell: few question the “perspective”. And nobody knows if it will be realised by 2020, 2030 or 2050.

The problem of the next step

Let us break down the problem to make it more manageable. To simplify, one could say that we have today an immediate “problem of the next step”: now that all the countries in the region (who are able to) have submitted their official applications for EU accession, the ball is in the EU’s court. But finding a coherent response is proving hard. Let me look at four specific problems in turn.

Bosnia-Herzegovina:

One can speak for days about Bosnia and its problems, which are as complex as its recent history; ESI has written many reports expressing our views, from the influence of a continuing (and increasingly discredited) international protectorate to the most promising way to advance a constitutional reform debate that makes Bosnia more functional. But there is one obvious reason why EU soft power is still so ineffective in Bosnia.

To have an EU perspective a country needs to find a consensus to apply and to meet the conditions to become a candidate. Yet the formal obstacle is obvious: as enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn stated clearly less than a year ago:

“Let me put it as plainly as I can: there is no way a quasi-protectorate can join the EU. Nor will an EU membership application be considered so long as the OHR is around. Let me even repeat this, to avoid any misunderstandings: a country with a High Representative can not become a candidate country with the EU.”

Olli Rehn is no longer enlargement commissioner, but Carl Bildt, who remains Swedish foreign minister, made the very same point in October 2009, “As you know the European Union is a union of sovereign democracies, not of protectorates. So, the presence of the OHR is, of course, blocking both the EU accession process and the NATO access process.”

This is not an isolated opinion at all. On 30 June 2010 the Communiqué of the Peace Implementation Steering Board repeated for the umpteenth time that this is remains the position of the PIC as well: http://www.ohr.int/dwnld/dwnld.html?content_id=45102

“The EU Member States of the PIC Steering Board reiterated that the EU would not be in a position to consider an application for membership by BiH until the transition of the OHR to a reinforced EU presence has been decided.”

This position also makes eminent sense: a country that is, supposedly, too fragile to cope without an international overlord, that is allegedly about to collapse if there is not always the option of a decree imposed from the OHR’s White House, is not meeting the minimum standards of being a stable democracy.

Behind the notion that Bosnia cannot cope without international protectorate institutions, however, stand a number of highly damaging attitudes towards Bosnia in general. Look, for a clear illustration, to the latest controversy over visa free travel for Bosnian citizens. As French state secretary for Europe Pierre Lellouche put it on 29 September, explaining why France at first suggested to postpone this step once more:

“La position du Gouvernement est la suivante : les visas relèvent de la sécurité et doivent donc s’accompagner de garanties très sérieuses. Or vous connaissez l?état politique de la Bosnie. Et pour qu’il y ait visa, il faut un État.”

What makes this position – “for there to be visa there needs to be a state” both ironic and tragic is that this senior European politician willfully overlooks the fact that in this specific and demanding case Bosnian leaders and institutions WERE able to meet all the EU conditions.

Bosnia has carried out complex and demanding reforms, passes laws and reformed institutions – and ESI has looked into this in great detail, as have the EU experts and the Commission. However, this story does not fit into the narrative of a political class unable for a variety of reasons to respond to normal incentives.

To paraphrase Lellouche, in order to meet the visa roadmap conditions Bosnia DID have to show that it was capable of acting as a state. And indeed it did. But the real lesson is ignored: that when the EU treats Bosnia like a normal state, “strict but fair”, it also gets results.

Bosnia politics is indeed complicated, and will always be complicated; that is the fate of complex multiethnic democracies, from Belgium to Spain. At the same time, no other country in the region needs the EU pre-accession process more badly than Bosnia. To provide a clear anchor for reforms. To provide specific roadmaps. To translate a shared vision of the future into concrete tasks. This makes it all the more tragic that Bosnia is also trapped by exaggerated defeatism, which prevents outsiders from offering credible incentives.

Kosovo:

Here I can be even shorter, given the constraints of time and space. Kosovo does not at this moment have a European perspective, because, for the EU 27, it is still not a state. At the same time Kosovo does not have a credible Europeanisation process either. In legal terms and in the way its political debates develop, independent Kosovo is still a protectorate.

How long will the ICO remain the supreme legal and executive authority in Kosovo? It is unclear. How long will EULEX have an exectutive mandate? It is unclear. How long will EU member states disagree on Kosovo? For the foreseeable future.

Under these conditions Kosovo has no European perspective. This also means, however, that the EU also has very little and indeed diminishing leverage in Pristina. It is common in European capitals to blame Kosovo’s love for all things American on an irrational infatuation of the elites in Kosovo with the large power that brought about independence. However, the limited leverage of the EU is above all a reflection of the lack of any clear pre-accession process.

Unless the EU finds a way to develop a status-neutral Europeanisation process. Some in the Commission are trying to work on this, but without political commitment they will not get far.

Macedonia:

Macedonia was awarded candidate status in 2005. Four years later Macedonia received a positive assessment by the European Commission.

“The country fulfils the commitments under the Stabilisation and Association Agreement, has consolidated the functioning of its democracy and ensured the stability of institutions guaranteeing the rule of law and respect of fundamental rights and the country has substantially addressed the key priorities of the accession partnership”.

In 2009 also Macedonia signed and ratified the border demarcation agreement with Kosovo, thus solving a decade-long bilateral problem.

Finally, in October 2009 the Commission recommended Macedonia’s transition to the second stage:

“In the light of the above considerations and taking into account the European Council conclusions of December 2005 and December 2006, the Commission recommends that negotiations for accession to the European Union should be opened with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”.

At the EU Council in December 2009 the matter was postponed:

“The Council notes that the Commission recommends the opening of accession negotiations with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and will return to the matter during the next presidency.” …

However, at the same time the Council asserted:

“maintaining good neighbourly relations, including a negotiated and mutually acceptable solution on the name issue … remains essential.”

This did not happen. So the Council did not return to the “Macedonian matter’ during the next (Spanish) presidency. For now, and unless and until this is resolved, Macedonia is as trapped as Kosovo and Bosnia.

Serbia:

Serbia, of course, is facing its own problems. What is problematic is never the reality of EU conditionality: this is, on the contrary, a positive tool to promote reforms and modernisation, as the President put it earlier today. The problem is that it is not always clear what exactly the conditions are.

One problem is expectations regarding Kosovo. Since the EU itself is divided over Kosovo, it is not always clear what it wants Serbia to do.

As the Belgian ambassador to Serbia noted recently Belgrade “must improve its relations with Kosovo” if it wants to join the EU and to “find a lasting modus vivendi”. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner noted that “The independence of Kosovo is irreversible. The opinion of the ICJ signals an important step towards putting an end to the legal debate on this issue, which will enable all parties to devote themselves, from now on, to other pending issues.” And he went on: “Kosovo and Serbia must now also find the path of political dialogue in order to overcome, by adopting a pragmatic approach, the concrete problems that remain between Belgrade and Pristina, in the interest of everyone and, above all, the Serbian community of Kosovo.” As Beta news agency noted a few weeks ago “EU circles and the member states who have recognized Kosovo are increasing pressure on Belgrade over Kosovo”:

“Last week, top officials of Belgium, which currently holds the EU rotating presidency, made it clear to President Boris Tadic that granting Serbis the status of candidate country would depend on Belgrade’s moves concerning Kosovo … Now, the stand that Kosovo and Serbia’s accession to the EU are two separate processes is no longer mentioned in European Union circles.”

Indeed. But what does this mean in practical terms? The EU places a lot of trust in a dialogue, as Kouchner also explained:

“Such a dialogue is important for the stability of the region. It is also necessary because the two States, Serbia and Kosovo, intend to become Member States of the European Union, and because their accession will be based on the assumption that they have established normal inter-State relations with each other enabling them to work together towards European integration.”

When expectations are clear, as we have seen recently in the context of the UN debate, Serbia has in fact responded very constructively. But this needs to become the model: expectations and red lines need to be defined by the EU, based on a principled approach which envisages the whole region as future members of the EU. It often is not.

Then, however, Serbia complied and the focus of conditionality has shifted to ICTY. Again, there is a consensus in the EU on the need for Serbia to cooperate and for Ratko Mladic to end up in The Hague. However, it would be fatal if the impression gains ground, in Serbia and in the region, that general enlargement skepticism is hiding behind the argument that Serbia is not performing on this sensitive matter even if there might be evidence to the contrary. This would only help those in Serbia who do have an interest to torpedo its European perspective.

At this stage, the EU would do well to allow the technical process of integration – including the writing of an opinion on Serbia’s application – to go ahead. This must not mean abandoning the focus on ICTY, but it could mean applying a similar standard as the one which was applied to Croatia in its own accession process.

What is to be done?

In short, there is a clear need for fresh thinking. The bull needs to be taken by the horns: issues which have been left ambiguous need to be addressed.

It would be tragic if, having come so far, the EU accession of the Western Balkans now gets stuck at this stage. This calls for a proactive EU policy.

In Bosnia, the EU should move to bring the protectorate to an end, and to treat Bosnia fairly, like all other Balkan countries.

In Kosovo the EU needs – in its own, the Kosovo and even Serbia’s interest – define a way for Europeanisation and European leverage to work. This requires a credible European perspective, if need be a status-neutral accession process, as a recent ECFR paper has argued.

In Macedonia it is high time to find a creative solution – ESI has proposed one possible way forward recently, to link the entering into force of a new agreed name to the date of the countries’ actual EU accession.

And when it comes to Serbia the EU should be both “strict” and “fair”: conditionality must be transparent, based on clear principles and standards, not non-transparent and a moving target. This applies to expectations regarding Bosnia, Kosovo as well as ICTY.

Serbia, the EU and the whole region have come a long way since October 2000. But the journey is far from over, and it is not only the countries of the region which need to take a hard look at what would need to be done to ensure that in the end the destination of a Europe whole and free, integrated and including the Balkans, will be reached.