Tag: European Union
A milestone, again
Today is Vidovdan, Saint Vitus’ Day for Serbs. It is the 623rd anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje, commemorated as a religio-national holiday by Serbs worldwide. It is also the date on which Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, precipitating World War I, as well as other major events in Serbian history.
Today there is one more: newly elected nationalist Tomislav Nikolic asked nationalist Ivica Dacic, leader of Slobodan Milosevic’s Socialist party, to form a new government, with the support of Nikolic’s own Progressive party as well as several smaller parties in the governing coalition.
There is nothing socialist about Dacic or progressive about Nikolic. Both are nationalists and pragmatists who draw support from an electorate disappointed in the performance of the more moderate nationalist Boris Tadic, who lost this month’s presidential election after more than seven years at the helm. All claim to be pro-European, but Tadic more loudly, definitively and effectively than Nikolic and Dacic.
Alternation in power is a vital part of democratic governance. Dacic participated as Interior Minister in Tadic’s last government, but Nikolic and his “progressives” are new to governing responsibility. It is a sign of the maturity of Serb’s still young democracy that the international community is taking Nikolic’s accession to power in stride, even if many might have preferred that Tadic win.
Both Nikolic and Dacic have already gone out of their way to consult with Moscow during the government formation process. That gives more than a hint of where they plan to steer Serbia, which even under Tadic has flirted with Russia and vaunted itself as non-aligned (whatever that means in the post-Cold War world).
What does this augur for Washington and Brussels? For Brussels, it likely means a deceleration in Serbia’s technical preparations for European Union membership, which proceeded apace under Tadic. A slow-down won’t cause any handwringing in Brussels, where the prospect of any new members before 2020 is unwelcome. The EU will want to keep Serbia on track for eventual membership, but it likely will feel far less pressure to offer a date to begin accession negotiations with a Dacic-led government.
That’s a good thing from Washington’s perspective. Serbia continued under Tadic to monkey in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as in Kosovo in unhelpful ways. Washington was hesitant to ask too much of Tadic, who argued that would strengthen his more nationalist competitors. A tougher EU stance is vital to moderating Serbia’s efforts to maintain strictly separate governing structures in both Bosnia’s Republika Srpska and northern Kosovo.
The day also saw the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia throw out one charge of genocide against Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic. I hope this is seen in Bosnia and Serbia as evidence that he is getting a fair trial.
More important was the decision on Tuesday in a Serbian court finding 14 people guilty of killing civilians in late 1991, during Serb efforts to seize parts of Croatian territory and cleanse it of Croats. As I argued at the OSCE earlier this week, acknowledgement of responsibility for wrongdoing is a key step in reconciliation. If the new nationalist leadership in Belgrade plays it right, the Serbian courts have given them an opening to acknowledge the past and by doing so improve relations between Serbia and its neighbors in the future.
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Albania’s role in the neighborhood
I spoke this morning at CSIS on this topic. Here are the notes I prepared for myself:
- In an important sense, Albania is the new guy on the Balkans block. It was thoroughly isolated from 1945 through the Cold War.
- The collapse of the Communist regime was cataclysmic for Albanians. I was in charge of the U.S. Embassy in Rome in August 1991 when the Vlora, a ship carrying 10,000 refugees, reached the port of Bari.
- Twice in the 1990s Italian troops were sent to Albania on what we would now call stabilization missions.
- When I went to observe the 1997 elections, I found myself in the midst of far more gunfire at night than in Sarajevo during the war.
- Less than 15 years later, Albania is a NATO member and sends peacekeepers abroad. It is an exporter of stability rather than an importer.
- Still the poorest country in Europe, Albania has suffered a slowdown in growth since the 2008 but weathered the financial crisis relatively well. Severe poverty is down sharply.
- Its role in the neighborhood is a positive one: Albania’s relations with neighbors Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Greece are generally very good.
- This is a remarkable achievement, one that merits a gold star no matter what I say farther on.
- There are problems. Albania’s problems are above all internal: its politics are contentious and sometimes violent, its public administration is weak, its economy is burdened with corruption and organized crime, rule of law is unreliable.
- These are all well-known and longstanding problems that will need to be addressed in the EU accession process, which has begun in recent years with the application for membership, the visa waiver and the Stabilization and Association Agreement, even if Brussels has not given Tirana candidate status or a date for negotiations to begin.
- I really see only one thing that could derail Albania’s progress towards European Union membership, if not in this decade then in the next one.
- That is its relationship with other Albanian populations in the Balkans. Fundamentally, it boils down to this: will the Albanians of the Balkans accept living in six different countries, or will they challenge the existing territorial arrangements?
- If I were in their shoes, I would not for a moment put at risk my hopes to be inside the European Union by unsettling borders in the Balkans or fooling with irredentist ambitions.
- Washington and Brussels will be unequivocal in rejecting Greater Albania ambitions, which could lead to catastrophic population movements and widespread instability.
- The wise course for Albania is to cure its internal ills, maintain good relations with all its neighbors, including Italy as well as those in the Balkans, and maintain close cultural ties with Albanians who live in other countries, including the United States.
- That Albania will continue to export stability, enjoy improving prosperity and enter the European Union with its double-headed eagle held high.
PS: A lot of people in the room, including the Albanian ambassador, thought Greater Albania was getting too much attention in the discussion. I trust they are right. The attention clearly reflects how strongly Americans feel the idea is a bad one, not how strongly Albanians are attached to it.
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Nikolic starts well, now let’s have fun
Tomislav Nikolic’s inauguration as President of Serbia went well: he pledged Serbia to a European future, committed himself to resolving regional problems through dialogue and promised future prosperity in return for hard work. He did not of course repeat his controversial remarks of recent days seeming to justify the Serb assault in the early 1990s on the Croatian town of Vukovar and his denial of genocide at the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
He did however necessarily commit himself to
protect the Constitution, respect and safeguard the territorial integrity of Serbia and try to unite all political forces in the country in order to identify and implement a common policy on the issue of Kosovo-Metohija.
This means that he maintains Serbia’s claim to all of Kosovo, despite loss of control over 89% of its territory and more or less the same percentage of its population. As required by the constitution, he denies the validity of the 2008 declaration of independence and recognition by 90 sovereign states.
The key question for today’s Serbia is whether and how Nikolic resolves the contradiction between his commitment to a European future for his country and his commitment to holding on to Kosovo. No Serb politician wants to admit that this contradiction exists, but it does and they all know it. Twenty-two European Union members have recognized Kosovo’s independence. They will be unwilling to accept Serbia into their club unless it accepts Kosovo’s sovereignty and establishes “good neighborly relations” with the democratically validated authorities in Pristina.
Belgrade has been inclined to put off any resolution of this contradiction for as long as possible. That is understandable. It involves a trade-off that is unappetizing: either give up Kosovo, or give up the EU.
But the failure to make a clear choice distorts judgment on other issues important to Serbia’s future: relationships with Russia, the United States and NATO as well as Serbia’s relationship with Kosovo’s Albanian citizens (Kosovo’s Serb citizens will presumably choose to remain Serbian citizens, though some have also accepted Kosovo citizenship).
The United States and the EU have been reluctant to press Serbia hard on its choice between the EU and Kosovo, for fear of undermining former President Boris Tadic and strengthening Nikolic’s more nationalist forces. It might appear that there is no longer need for that reluctance with Nikolic in the presidency. But there is a real possibility that Tadic will become prime minister and lead the first government of Nikolic’s mandate. That would enable Serbia to renew its diplomatic manipulation of the West on the Kosovo vs. EU issue.
Nikolic in the past has been more inclined to advocate partition of Kosovo than to give up all claim to it. This proposition won’t go anywhere. The Americans and the Europeans are solidly against it, because it would precipitate a domino-effect of partitions in Macedonia, Bosnia, Cyprus and perhaps farther afield. The Kosovars would ask for the Albanian-majority area of southern Serbia in trade, something Belgrade would not want to offer. More importantly: it is not in the interest of most Serbs who live in Kosovo (outside the northern area Serbia would hope to claim). The Serbian church, whose important sites are all in the south, is solidly opposed.
I’ll hope that Nikolic defies the odds and gets courageous about Kosovo: it is lost to Serbian sovereignty. All politicians in Belgrade, including Nikolic, understand that, but no one wants to accept responsibility for it. Some of my Serb Twitter followers and email correspondents assure me there is not a chance in hell Nikolic will: that’s why they voted for him. They want him to choose Kosovo over the tarnished EU.
They may well be correct, but I’ll wait to see what Nikolic does. His first test will be implementation of the agreements already reached with Pristina. Tadic did precious little to make them operational. If Nikolic wants to stick his predecessor with responsibility for them, he’ll demand that they be implemented by a newly named prime minister, whether it be Tadic or someone else from his Democratic Party.
Nikolic could also change Serbia’s policy on United Nations membership for Kosovo, thus forcing Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic to preside in his new position as General Assembly president over Pristina’s acceptance into the UN. Watching that would be worth almost any admission price.
I’m not holding my breath for any of this to happen. Just saying it would be fun.
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Serbia and Europe, at risk
Sonja Biserko, President of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and the Eric Lane Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Josip Glaurdic, the Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, write:
In an expression of the real spirit of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolić won the presidential election on a wave of popular discontent thanks to a series of blunders by former President Tadić’s Democratic Party. The conservative segment of Serbia’s society and a consolidated populist right are the beneficiaries. The result presents a potentially momentous challenge for Serbia, its neighbors, and the whole of Europe. With Nikolić at its helm, Serbia is now an unreliable partner, save perhaps for Putin’s Russia.
Nikolić’s victory and the strong showing of his Serbian Progressive Party in earlier parliamentary elections have brought the decade-long efforts to keep Serbia on a Euroatlantic course into question. Serbia’s contemporary political climate and its political culture have demonstrated the low achievement of its democratic transition. Since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in October 2000, Serbia has not achieved political consensus regarding its future or its strategic orientation.
In spite of efforts in Brussels to spin Serbia’s electoral results into a “victory of pro-European forces,” these electoral results have exposed as perilously fragile the political engineering that has tried to bind Serbia into European integration. What Serbs term the “grey zone” of their politics – the security apparatus, the current and former military brass, the nationalist intelligentsia – abandoned Tadić because it wanted to slow down Serbia’s European integration and halt the process of coming to terms with Serbia’s recent past. The grey zone will now seek to slow democratic reforms and normalization of relations with the rest of the region. Serbia’s dialogue with Kosovo, its judicial, military, and police reforms, its cooperation with NATO and integration with the EU–already sluggish–will grind to a halt.
The president-elect rushed to announce that his foreign policy will be “both Russia and the EU,” that he will never recognize Kosovo, that he recognizes Montenegro but not the Montenegrins as a nation, and that Serbia does not want NATO membership. His recent statements to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recalling Serb ambitions he supported to take Croatian territory serve as a potent reminder of the tragic policies of the 1990s, which could revive under his leadership.
Tadić’s loss jeopardizes the Democratic Party, which faces an identity and leadership crisis similar to the one it faced after the assassination of its leader and Serbia’s Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003. The Democratic Party could be irreparably damaged as an organizational foundation for reform. The further slowdown, or even reversal, of Serbia’s democratic transformation could frustrate consolidation and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro and even cause regional instability.
A great deal depends on the stance of the EU and the Unites States. The electoral results were an indirect consequence of a subtle, but noticeable, policy shift in Brussels and Washington. The appeal of Tomislav Nikolić among centrist voters (which, at the very least, led to their decision to abstain from voting) arguably had a lot to do with Western signals of approval of his possible victory and of his supposed transformation from a nationalist radical into a pro-European conservative.
Those in Western capitals who crafted such a policy shift seem not to have learned much from recent history. They are bound to be disappointed by Nikolić, just as they were let down by their two other notable “projects” – Serbia’s former Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik. Serbia and Europe will have to live with Nikolić as president for at least the next five years. If its relationship with Tadić was difficult because of his inability to shed nationalist ballast, Brussels is in for an even more frustrating ride with Nikolić.
European leaders will still have to rise to the challenge and offer a real path to EU integration for all the countries of the Western Balkans, and especially for Serbia’s neighbors. Only a strategy which continuously supports the accession process can ensure that the region, no matter how slowly, moves forward and that the EU maintains its position of influence.
Any sign of a decline in commitment to enlargement by the EU capitals lowers the Union’s influence and, thus also the influence of the truly pro-European forces in politics and society. This could have even more devastating consequences for the democratization and stabilization of the whole region than the election of Tomislav Nikolić.
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Why partition of Kosovo is bad for Serbs
Today I spent a couple of hours at the Serbian orthodox monastery in Dečani, a 14th century beauty of enormous historical and religious significance to the Serbian Church. There is only one Serb living in the town, which lies in a cradle of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The monastery currently houses 24 monks and is building a guest house to handle an increased flow of visitors.
I heard no flag-waving Serb nationalism at the monastery. The mood there is contemplative and reflective. No one there wanted Kosovo independence, but political frameworks are transitory. The Church needs to ensure its own permanence.
Its primary concerns are two: the welfare of its flock and the protection of its churches, monasteries and other property. Most of these are south of the Ibar river, which is often proposed as the dividing line for a partition between the Serb-majority population of the north and the Albanian-majority population of the south. The Church opposes partition. It would lead to the loss of the Serb population south of the Ibar and most of the precious churches, monasteries and property.
But that view does not carry much weight in Belgrade, where the politicians simply want to hold onto something in Kosovo so that they can claim they have not lost everything. Nor is the Church particularly influential in northern Kosovo, where it has nevertheless tried to convince Serbs not to use violence.
It hasn’t been entirely successful at that either. Serbs in the north have erected barricades–including a large cross–on an important road. KFOR, the NATO-led force that is entrusted by the UN Security Council with ensuring a safe and secure environment in Kosovo, tried to remove them yesterday morning, leading to a clash in which two German soldiers and one American were reportedly injured. The Church is unhappy when such clashes occur, since they increase ethnic tension throughout Kosovo and raise doubts about whether the majority of Serbs who live south of the Ibar can continue to do so.
Kosovo’s government is currently completing the process of adopting constitutional amendments and laws to implement all aspects of the Ahtisaari plan, a proposal for settlement of the Kosovo dispute that was rejected by Belgrade because it entailed Kosovo independence. It provides extensive protection for Serbs and Church property. But the Church worries that constitutional amendments and laws are not sufficient. It wants international guarantees, since there are Albanian political parties that would seek to reverse anything done now to offer protection, should they come to power in the future.
The Western-educated elite that runs many Kosovo institutions today has good intentions. But this elite has little to do with the more traditional clan structures that hold power at the local level. The Church wants the international community to ensure that guarantees will last, no matter who comes to power in Pristina.
All of this sounds to me well grounded and rational. Unfortunately, it is not what we are hearing out of President-elect Tomislav Nikolić in Belgrade. He is still attached to partition ideas that would destabilize a large part of the Balkans.
It is high time Europe as a whole minced no words about this. I doubt Angela Merkel will: her message on a visit last summer to Belgrade was unequivocally against partition. She presumably won’t hesitate to reiterate that message now that two more Germans have been injured. But more is needed: Greece and Cyprus in particular need to recognize that their refusal to recognize Kosovo is encouraging partition proposals that, if adopted, would end with the partition of their favorite island.
Not to mention the loss of this spectacular monastery:
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A fortiori
Marko Prelec of International Crisis Group asks a good question:
…if it is indeed a “miracle that the Kosovo government gets anything done with so many foreigners people looking over its shoulders” and thus “the time is coming this fall for this overly supervised country to struggle on its own”, is not the same true a fortiori of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where international supervision will this year mark its seventeenth anniversary?
The difference is in part constitutional. Kosovo has a workable constitution. Bosnia and Herzegovina does not, because the Americans in their haste froze in place the warring parties and then the international community failed to make adequate provision for returns. Had we written a constitution for Bosnia that was even half as savvy as the one for Kosovo (which had the benefit of the Bosnia experience), and achieved as much implementation, we wouldn’t still be hanging around.
The High Representative and EUFOR are also a lot less present in Bosnia than UNMIK, EULEX, and KFOR and the rest of the alphabet soup in Kosovo. The ICO (the International Civilian Office) is the exception that proves the rule. It has “Bonn”-type powers in Kosovo but hasn’t had to use them. That was wise restraint in part, but it was also that no really compelling occasion arose. The Dayton agreement is just a whole lot harder to implement than the Kosovo agreement, except in northern Kosovo. And there it will not be easy for the Kosovars or the international community to end supervision.
It is therefore not the length of time that the international community hangs around that determines whether it needs to stay longer. We stayed in Germany–administering Berlin no less–for 45 years, because of the Soviet occupation of the East. That’s the general rule: it is the specific conditions of the peace you are trying to implement that determine how long you stay. Kosovo has implemented the Ahtisaari plan. Bosnia has not fully implemented Dayton. Stability could break down and cause a big mess. So we stay until conditions allow us to leave. That isn’t unreasonable to me.
One could argue of course that shifting responsibility to the locals, as we are planning to do in Afghanistan, would force them to behave more responsibly. But that hasn’t really worked in Iraq, isn’t likely to work in Afghanistan and certainly won’t work in Bosnia, where Republika Srpska has no intention at all of implementing the provisions of the Dayton agreements that it doesn’t like, much less help prepare Bosnia for European Union membership. A fortiori, it is not wise to expect better if international supervision is withdrawn. So it needs to stay.
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