The EU gives Serbia time

The European Union today decided to postpone a decision on Serbia’s candidacy for membership.  According to B92:

…Serbia will get the EU candidate status by March 2012 if the European Council is convinced that Serbia is showing genuine commitment, that it has achieved progress in the implementation of agreements reached in the dialogue (with Priština), including integrated border management, that it has reached an agreement on overall regional cooperation and is actively cooperating in enabling EULEX and KFOR to perform their mandates.

The same article says that the Council has noted significant progress Serbia has made in fulfilling the Copenhagen political criteria, adding that the cooperation with The Hague Tribunal is completely satisfactory.

When it comes to determining the date for the beginning of Montenegro’s accession talks, the article 15 says that the talks could begin in June 2012, when the Council will review the country’s progress in implementing reforms, with a special focus on the rule of law, respect for fundamental rights and suppression of corruption and organized crime.

The postponement was the right thing to do, and this all sounds eminently reasonable, but too foggy, to me.  What does it mean to reach an “overall agreement on regional cooperation”?  How is “genuine commitment” to be judged?  What constitutes enabling EULEX and KFOR to perform their mandates?

I might hope that greater clarity lies under the fog, along the lines Angela Merkel suggested last summer:  Belgrade needs to cooperate with Pristina in eliminating the Serbian parallel structures, establishing border/boundary controls and reintegrating the north with the rest of Kosovo.  But I doubt it.  What we are seeing here is a lowering of the bar, with the hope of getting Serbia candidacy status two months before its parliamentary elections in May, so as to boost the chances of Boris Tadic’s Democratic Party.

Boris Tadic would do well to use the time this postponement gives him to exert his authority over the Serb population in northern Kosovo, which seems to be more beholden to his political rivals and Serbia’s secret services than to the institutions of the Serbian state that pays many of their salaries.  It once upon a time served his purposes well to deny he controlled them.  Now it is becoming a serious embarrassment that threatens to cast doubt on whether Serbia can in fact control its own borders and meet other EU requirements.