EU Again Postponing the Inevitable: Western Balkans Memberships (Brussels Morning)
Channel: Sam Vaknin's Musings
Date: 2023-06-17

Brussels Morning Column: https://brusselsmorning.com/eu-again-postponing-the-inevitable-western-balkans-memberships/32875/

In 2003, an exuberant European Union met with the countries of the Western Balkans (Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania) in Thessaloniki, Greece and promised all of them accession. Some established EU members, like Austria, sponsored this collective vision. 

Slovenia joined a year later and Croatia became an EU member in 2013. Both are former Yugoslav republics. This rankled: the 5 remaining rumps of Yugoslavia felt unjustly excluded. Twenty years later, they still are – and do.

Equally impoverished and badly governed countries – Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta, to mention but a few – joined over the years. Arguably, the strategic importance of the Western Balkans exceeds that of Romania. So, why the delay?

In the meantime, Russia has been busy exploiting the EU’s inexplicable and discriminatory procrastination to make inroads into the region, most notably in Serbia and Bulgaria and, more recently, in North Macedonia.

As European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyden, admitted recently, at the GLOBSEC conference in Bratislava, “it is not enough to say that the door is open”. Indeed, ‘tis not.

Von Leyden came up with the solipsistic proposal to grant the mostly agricultural Balkan polities access to Europe’s digital market mechanisms and tools, including its e-commerce and cybersecurity aspects. This would increase the trade in physical goods and in services, she pronounced oracularly.

She reiterated the typical vow to increase pre-accession funding, but, as usual, refrained from pegging a number on her largesse. This kind of bribery (or ransom) has been going on for decades, leading exactly nowhere.

On the sidelines, informally, the Commission mooted the tantalizing possibility of granting the patient countries of the Balkans access to Europe’s Horizon funding for innovation and research and development.
Equally the EU’s TEN-T, its trans-European transport network policy, could soon open its doors to the expectant wannabe members. 

Both proposals are surrealistic in their irrelevance. The countries of the western Balkans require investments in infrastructure, advanced farming, manufacturing, tourism, and education, not in cybersecurity and cross-continental high speed trains.

By far the most offending gesture was the mealy-mouthed invitation to the ambassadors of the long-spurned candidates to sit in on preparatory meetings of the council in Brussels, sharing a conference table with representatives of the actual constituents of the hallowed Union. 

The urbane Minister of Foreign Affairs of North Macedonia, Bujar Osmani, welcomed closer integration pre-accession, but in thinly disguised exasperation, warned that the region is just “hanging” and in dire need of “scaffolding”.

He recalled previous instances of fervid imminent accession that faded together with the emergencies that bred them. In 2015, when migrants made the western Balkans their preferred gateway to Europe, the EU called for swift integration. Such talk dwindled as the smuggling of Syrian and other refugees abated.  

Another Albanian, the Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, bitterly reminisced on how the countries of the EU stingily hoarded COVID-19 jabs and refused to share them with the decimated locales of the Western Balkans. On that occasion, some of these countries turned to Russia, Turkey, and China as well as to their regional proxies (Serbia) to beg for the life-saving vaccines.

In the meantime, tensions in the region are again ramping up. Kosovo and Serbia are at each other’s throats on a host of bilateral issues. Serbian President, Alexander Vucic, cancelled his participation in GLOBSEC, presumably irked and incensed by the belated inclusion of the Kosovar Prime Minister, Albin Kurti.

The EU’s foreign policy honcho, Josep Borrell, and the envoy to the region, Miroslav Lajcak, were left idle as the much anticipated round of talks in Bratislava failed to materialize. Montenegro’s President, Milo Djukanovic, half-jokingly reminded the grandees that, in the Balkans, no one knows what the day will bring.

The Western Balkans has always been a powder keg. Only the prospect of EU accession is keeping it pacified, collaborative, and compliant with norms of civility and liberal-democracy. 

But hope alone cannot sustain this departure from previous history. China and Russia are making inroads. It is high time to render the European Union more European and finally fully united.