The handwriting on the wall

The European Council at the level of heads of state and government decided Friday that accession negotiations with Serbia will open formally January 21.  This marks an important advance in Serbia’s transition from a thuggish autocracy under Slobodan Milosevic to an increasingly open and democratic society 14 years later.  The process of meeting European Union standards and gaining admission will likely take another decade, as Croatia’s accession did.  It will be a hard slog.  But many of the benefits and costs of EU membership occur even before formal accession.  Serbia can expect ample funding to pay for the adjustment process.

This puts Serbia more or less in the middle of the pack in the Balkans “regatta” for EU membership.  Slovenia and Croatia are already EU members, Montenegro is in the process of negotiating accession, Macedonia is already a candidate and awaits only resolution of its dispute with Greece over its name to start accession negotiations, Albania awaits candidate status, Bosnia and Herzegovina has concluded a Stabilization and Association Agreement (a prelude to candidacy) and Kosovo is still negotiating one.  But Serbia has particular weight in the Balkans:  it is geographically central, played an important role for the better part of a century in Yugoslavia and is still demographically and economically a relative heavyweight, despite a greying population and a stalled economy.

Serbian accession to the EU would be a relatively uninteresting process of adoption and implementation of the acquis communitaire except for one thing:  Kosovo.  Serbia’s President and government deny accepting its independence and sovereignty, even while reaching practical agreements that amount to doing so.

The EU, though it includes five member states that have not recognized Kosovo, is not going to be interested in ambiguity on this point.  Establishment of good neighborly relations with Kosovo is already a key requirement for Brussels.  So too is the conviction that Kosovo and Serbia will each have to make their way to the EU at their own pace and on their own steam, without one blocking the other.  This implies that both are sovereign and independent, since only sovereign and independent states can apply for membership.  And the EU is now said to be insisting on a “legally binding agreement on the normalization of relations” between Kosovo and Serbia before Serbia’s EU accession.

Serbia’s politicians will have to decide for themselves when to tell their constituents what the handwriting on the wall means.  But there can be no denying it is there.  There are today 28 members of the EU.  Any one of them can block Serbia’s membership over failure to normalize relations with Kosovo.  Judging from current circumstances, several would do so without Serbia formally recognizing Kosovo as sovereign and independent and exchanging ambassadors with Pristina.  My guess is the process of EU accession will go more quickly and easily if that happens sooner rather than later.

For those with biblical inclinations, the original handwriting on the wall appears in the Old Testament’s book of Daniel:

Daniel read it “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” and explained it to mean that God had “numbered” the kingdom of Belshazzar and brought it to an end; that the king had been weighed and found wanting; and that his kingdom was divided and given to the Medes and Persians (Dan. v. 1-28).

Any correspondence to contemporary events is obviously incidental, but possibly meaningful.