Tag: European Union
A step in the right direction
So Dačić and Thaçi have met in Lady Ashton’s office in Brussels. The world has barely noticed. That’s the good news. While their domestic oppositions may criticize the two prime ministers (of Serbia and Kosovo, respectively) for “giving in” to each other, no one else thinks this meeting is really a big deal. They may not have shaken hands, but they have taken a quiet step towards normalizing relations.
That is what the European Union has rightly insisted on. Ashton deserves credit for pulling this meeting off, so far as I know as a surprise. I find myself in comfortable agreement with my professor colleagues Ognjen Pribićević and Predrag Simić, former Serbian ambassadors in Berlin and Paris respectively. The meeting is important symbolically and will reduce the tension between Belgrade and Brussels. There is still a long road ahead, at the end of which Serbia will have to choose between the EU and Kosovo. This is a first step in the right direction.
The question is whether there is more in than that. I suspect so. The EU has made it clear in recent days that Serbia cannot expect to hold on to part of Kosovo. Dačić has implicitly, if not explicitly, accepted this EU condition in meeting with Thaçi, whose commitment to Kosovo’s territorial integrity is not to be doubted. President Nikolić and Aleksander Vučić, defense and deputy prime minister, must be enjoying putting their coalition partner Dačić out front on an issue that has little upside in Serbian politics.
What did Thaçi give? Implicitly if not explicitly he has I trust agreed to discuss north Kosovo with Belgrade. This is very much the right thing to do. There can be no resolution of the situation there without cooperation from Belgrade in the reintegration process, which will have to be carefully planned and implemented. But there are those in Pristina who prefer to use north Kosovo has a bludgeon rather than get it resolved, so Thaçi will no doubt get some flak for moving ahead.
I trust Washington contributed something to this effort, if only encouraging Thaçi. I suspect it may also have had a hand in the strange high-profile visit of Clint Williamson to Belgrade earlier this week. He is the American the EU has named to lead an investigation of crimes against Serbs, including alleged involvement of Thaçi. That enabled the Belgrade’s political leaders to pose as protectors of the Serbs just before the meeting with Thaçi.
Kosovo and Serbia still have a long way to go. It is my hope that they can develop the habit of helping each other get over the bumps in the road. That will require a lot more effort from both Brussels and Washington, both of which should be gratified to see that their tough stance on partition has bent Belgrade in the right direction.
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A bird’s eye view of north Kosovo
A well-informed, well-situated birdie offers the following picture of what is going on in northern Kosovo and its broader implications. None of it is surprising, and none of it is confirmed by hard evidence, but worth pondering nevertheless. Solutions are going to have to take current circumstances into account:
The main reason why most ordinary Serbs in northern Kosovo are refusing to integrate into Pristina’s political system and institutions is not that they fear local kingpins but because they also benefit from smuggling even if they are not criminals themselves. Almost everyone there has at least one relative – in either their immediate or broader families – who is involved in smuggling business, and almost all Serb families are interconnected in one way or another. Profits from smuggling are so huge that gang bosses are able to bribe a large number of people into turning a blind eye to organized crime. In other words, even if you are not directly engaged in illegal business, you can benefit indirectly from it. The result is that most people have virtually no job but are nevertheless able to provide for themselves thanks to these high profits from smuggling. Therefore, they see no interest in changing a situation favorable to themselves, in spite of all the anarchy that exists in the area.
The Serbian gendarmerie troops deployed across areas bordering Kosovo are ordered to prevent only the illegal transfers of commodities from Kosovo into Serbia but not from Serbia into Kosovo.
Belgrade finds it difficult to dismantle the parallel institutions in northern Kosovo because a number of high-level Serbian politicians from nearly all relevant political parties and consecutive governments (including the incumbent one) were in earlier periods involved in smuggling and other criminal activities related to Kosovo by providing political protection to prominent criminals and getting in return a share of the profits. This enables criminals and their accomplices from unreformed parts of security-intelligence apparatus to blackmail these politicians with compromising material. So, even if they were willing to comply with demands from Brussels – and especially Berlin – to dismantle the parallel Serb structures, their hands are virtually tied.
Of particular interest is that this account puts the emphasis on things Brussels should worry about: the selective porousness of the boundary between Pristina’s control and Belgrade’s, the pervasive influence of organized crime and the compromised situation of Belgrade’s national leadership.
Some of my readers will object that this concerns only the Serbian side of the equation. They are correct. I don’t have the same kind of inside view of the Albanian side, though I will be glad to publish it if someone reliable provides it. I have no doubt but that there are beneficiaries south of the Ibar river that separates the areas of Belgrade and Pristina control.
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The EU needs a unified polity
The European Union unquestionably deserves the Nobel Prize for its past accomplishments. To cite just a few: peace between France and Germany, post-World War II European economic development and prosperity (no it wasn’t all due to the Marshall Plan), absorbing a reunified Germany and what used to be called eastern Europe into the European architecture, most of the staffing of peacekeeping operations in the Balkans (and many other parts of the world) in the 1990s and 2000s (and most of the aid money)…
The question is whether the much-expanded EU of 27 countries can do for the next generation what it has done for the last two. While I count myself a euro-enthusiast, I doubt it. Without a decisive move towards greater political unity, the EU is hamstrung. And the politics in many European countries–from Germany to Greece–militates against greater unity.
The EU’s current problems arise essentially from its inability to make quick and wise decisions. There is a dramatic contrast between European slowness in responding to the euro’s problems and the American reaction to its 2008 financial crisis. Consensus at 27 is difficult to achieve, even in the best of circumstances. When the decisions involve redistributing big economic and financial burdens, politics in the member states will rarely align.
Europe has created a unified economic space, but it lacks a unified political space. As we happen to be enjoying an American presidential campaign, it should be clear what this means. Even with the archaic electoral college process, which bends the campaign into a focus on the relatively few “battle ground” states, it is clear that Romney and Obama are conducting campaigns that try to appeal throughout the country. Europe is essentially stuck with a political system resembling the one we had under the Articles of Confederation, but its economic system is continent-wide. There are no European officials elected in constituencies that extend beyond the national borders of the member states.
This matters to Americans, because Europe is one of our biggest markets (as we are to Europe), a giant source of investment (also as we are to them), an educational and cultural partner of the first order, and still our most important military alliance, even if EU military capabilities have naturally atrophied with the continental peace its members now enjoy. Slow American economic growth today is due in part to Europe’s current financial crisis and its economic consequences. The NATO mission in Afghanistan relies in part on European contributions, as did the NATO-led effort against Muammar Qaddafi.
I am about to go off to moderate a talk by the Macedonian defense minister, Fatmir Besimi. His troops guard NATO headquarters in Kabul, even though Greece has blocked his country’s membership in the Alliance. That, too, is an example of Europe’s continuing political division and how it hampers a stronger, more effective European Union.
I can offer no solution. The Europeans will have to find it for themselves, as they have often in the past. It is not going to be easy. America did it by writing a new constitution behind closed doors in Philadelphia. That won’t work in the Twitter age. I hope this Nobel Prize, ironically awarded by a committee in Norway (which has declined EU membership), will inspire Europeans to unify their political space.
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I agree with Dačić
If anyone still doubted Belgrade’s continuing determination to partition Kosovo, Prime Minister Dačić’s horrified reaction to mention of Kosovo’s territorial integrity in a European Union report on enlargement should remove all doubt. The EU made an almost banal remark:
Addressing the problems in northern Kosovo, while respecting the territorial integrity of Kosovo and the particular needs of the local population, will be an essential element of this process.
Dačić responded:
I am fairly upset with this statement, since it could close the Belgrade-Priština dialogue, instead of helping (re)start it. Perhaps it would have been more honest to ask Serbia to recognize Kosovo than to recognize (its) state integrity.
He’s right: the EU is insisting on Serbian acknowledgement of Kosovo’s territorial integrity, which is a step towards recognition of Kosovo as a sovereign state. Dačić and President Nikolić have been trying to duck this issue for months. They have been hoping against hope that the EU will not state bluntly what Belgrade has been told repeatedly by Germany, Sweden, the UK and other EU members: the boundary between Kosovo and Serbia will not be moved to accommodate ethnic differences. Serbia will have to recognize Kosovo’s sovereignty and territorial integrity before it can hope to enter the EU. Belgrade has taken what comfort it could from the notion that the EU itself has never before said it.
Now the EU has. That should not be surprising: UN Security Council resolution 1244, which ended the NATO/Yugoslavia war, is absolutely clear in referring to Kosovo as a single, undivided entity from which all Yugoslav (now Serbian) security forces were to be removed. That never happened, hence the current struggle over north Kosovo, where Serbia still rules in clear violation of the UN Security Council resolution to which Belgrade constantly appeals in its claim to sovereignty over (you guessed it) all of undivided Kosovo.
For those who will object that borders have been changed in other parts of the Balkans, let me preempt: the status of the republic borders of former Yugoslavia (and of the federal unit known as Kosovo) has been changed from internal boundary to international border, but the lines have not been moved to accommodate ethnic differences.
For others who may think Cyprus represents a model the EU might want to follow (allowing Serbian accession with a territorial dispute unresolved), forget about it. No one in the EU wants to repeat that mistake.
I agree with Dačić. There is really no point in reopening the dialogue with Pristina, much less at a political level, unless Serbia is prepared to commit itself to cooperating on the reintegration of the north with the rest of Kosovo. This is the sine qua non of the talks. Without it, the EU should be prepared to wait to give Serbia a date for opening negotiations on accession. Anything softer than that risks destabilizing Macedonia, Bosnia and, by the way, Cyprus.
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The brighter side
Kosovo’s Minister for Economic Development, Besim Beqaj, stopped by last week to talk at SAIS. I was too busy with Yom Kippur and a wife’s illness to write him up quickly, but I doubt any of what he said is yet out of date. So here is my summary, with apologies for anything I’ve gotten wrong (the numbers are particularly difficult to keep track of–I’ll print corrections if you send them to me):
Kosovo found itself at the end of the NATO/Yugoslavia war in 1999 with a devastated economy and two big challenges: post-war reconstruction and transition from badly broken socialism to a free economy. Beqaj himself started his career as a teacher in the parallel education sytem, which undertook the schooling of Kosovo’s Albanians during the 1990s outside the official Belgrade-sponsored system. At the end of the war, 120,000 houses were damaged out of a housing stock of 400,000. Ninety-five per cent of the refugees and displaced people returned quickly, within two months.
Kosovo needed a state. Today it has one that declared independence in 2008 and substantially completed the implementation of Ahtisaari’s Comprehensive Peace Settlement proposal this year. Governance is decentralized, minority protection is enshrined in law, and 91 other states have recognized Kosovo, which is already a member of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and will soon be a member of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Kosovo’s breach last year of its IMF agreement has proven temporary. Within eight months it was back under an IMF program and will stay there.
The state-building process is not yet complete. The long pole in the tent is rule of law. Kosovo has asked for the EU rule of law mission (EULEX) to stay for two more years. Education needs a major upgrade. Unemployment is high, especially among the young.
Still, Kosovo has enjoyed high growth rates (estimated at 4.4% in 2012), 40% of its budget is devoted to capital investments in infrastructure, GDP has grown to 2700 euros/year, debt is under 7% of GDP and foreign direct investment last year amounted to 400 million euros. The road to Durres in Albania is a major improvement. The next infrastructure priority is the road to Skopje, which will start construction soon (I was relieved to hear that!).The Central European Free Trade Agreement provides access to a market of 25 million, in addition to trade agreements with both Europe and the United States.
The National Council for Economic Development has set five goals:
1. Maintaining fiscal stability (legislation limits government debt to 40% of GDP);
2. Improving the environment for investment by reducing red tape and empowering the private sector;
3. Privatizing state enterprises, with priority going to telecommunications (a competition is now in process), the energy sector and mining (much improved airport operations are already in private hands);
4. Revitalizing agriculture and food processing;
5. Developing human capital, including civic education.
All legislation implementing these and other priorities must be aligned with European Union requirements. Ninety per cent of Kosovo citizens would approve a referendum in favor of EU membership.
Kosovo still faces serious difficulties. The Serbian campaign against diplomatic recognition has hurt the state’s prospects and its ability to provide for practical things like “green card” insurance coverage for people who want to travel outside Kosovo by car. Smuggling into Kosovo and back into Serbia) on small roads in the north is costly to both Pristina and Belgrade. As much as $200 million euros in electric bills remain unpaid by Serbs living in the north, which remains a major issue.
It was left to me to ask the obvious question: what about corruption? The Minister replied that the perception is worse than the reality. He pointed to UNDP/USAID polling that suggests only 8% of the population has personal experience of corruption. Eighty-two per cent of the population knows of corruption only through the media or through talking with friends and relatives.
Alas, that same polling shows low levels of satisfaction (among both Serbs and Albanians) with the government, which gets most of the blame for the still difficult economic situation. Besim Beqaj and his colleagues still have a tough road ahead.
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The Federation revisited
As some readers will know, I was known during the Bosnian war as Gospodin Federacije, because I was in charge of U.S. support to the Federation that had ended the 1992-4 Bosniak/Croat war and was supposed to govern on territory controlled by the Bosnian Republic Army and the Croat Defense Force. So when the Bosnian version of the Croatian daily Večernji list asked some questions (mildly edited here for English grammar and spelling), I replied:
1. How would you describe current situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) having in mind that there’s no stable coalition on the state or entity level and everyone is trying to remove the other party from power?
DPS: I’d describe as you have: no stable coalition at the state or entity level and everyone trying to get rid of everyone else. That’s called politics in a sharply divided polity. At least it’s peaceful.
2. How much is BiH important to US and is it a major focus right now, and how would you coment on a more powerful engagement in this country?
DPS: Bosnia is way down the list of U.S. priorities today. I don’t think you can expect a more powerful U.S. engagement, unless things get really bad. Even then I’m not certain.
3. Is it time to shut down and relocate Office of the High Representative outside BiH and strengthen the role of Mr. Peter Sorensen and the European Union Special Representative in BiH?
DPS: I don’t see much purpose in relocating the OHR and it is clearly premature to shut him down. Peter Sorensen’s role is quite distinct from the OHR’s. And it has a narrower constituency.
4. A lot of Croat and Serb politicians reproach that U.S. administration for letting Turkey have broader political infulence in the BiH. Do You consider that approach productive or harmful?
DPS: I think Turkey has played a very positive role in many ways in the Balkans: peacekeeping, investment, trade, even politics. It is their backyard and they have every reason to try to make sure it evolves in a peaceful and European direction.
5. Many European diplomats to whom I’ve spoken consider that the Dayton experiment has shown its limits and weaknesses. Some of them told me as a matter of fact it’s failure. Would you like to take comment on that? Is it time for radical change?
DPS: European mouths are sometimes more active than their brains. I’d like to see their plan for radical change before commenting on it.
6. The Dayton political system gave key powers to three constituent national groups: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. Key Croatian and Serb politicians consider that the imposition of national representatives in the previous two election cycles have caused the most serious crisis in this country. How is it possible to establish a system that would guarantee equal rights to all constituent national groups and from the other hand citizens having in mind also verdict in case Sejdic – Finci?
DPS: My view is that equal rights should be established on an individual basis and protected by the rule of law, not by group rights protected by thuggish political leaders. I don’t think there should be any ethnic criteria for the presidency of a country of which I am a citizen. But the perspective among many Bosnians is different, and I respect that.
7. How do you comment demands of the Croats in Bosnia, who are the most vulnerable ethnic group in Bosnia, for restructuring of the country in order to have equal rights with two other people. There’s always mentioning of the third entity!?
DPS: The Croats got a very good deal at Dayton: half the Federation and one-third of the state. That’s because they then held a stranglehold on the Federation and Croatia’s military power was vital. Now the military balance is irrelevant, Croatia is entering the European Union and therefore no longer a major factor inside Bosnia, and there are far fewer Croats in Bosnia than at the time of Dayton. Why would they get a better deal now than in 1995? If I were a nationalist Croat, I’d be cautious about reopening an agreement that was highly favorable to Croat nationalists.
8. Do you consider that development in Catalonia would have impact on BiH, maybe some new Dodik initiative?
DPS: No. Whatever happens in Catalonia, it is not based on the ethnic cleansing of more than half the population on its territory.
9. The US administration is lobbying for constitutional changes in the Federation of BiH. They have in mind to change the internal organization of the Federation. What is your view on this initiative?
DPS: I don’t understand it well enough to comment, but see my response to 7 above.
10. What would Croatian accession to the EU mean for BiH and the region?
DPS: I hope it will be inspiration to BiH, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia and Kosovo to get their act together, as Croatia did, and meet the criteria for membership. At the same time, it may disrupt some trading and travel patterns and create some stresses in the rest of the Balkans. The important thing is to recognize that all of the Balkans should soon be members, but only if they make the necessary reforms.
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