Tag: European Union

The hurdle in Lebanon is political

Posted in Daniel Serwer - August 28, 2020 - 0 Comment
https://twitter.com/i/status/1299115223069192194

Randa Slim and I published a piece on Beirut reconstruction today in Foreign Affairs today. As we focus in the piece on investigation of the explosion and reconstruction, it did not treat the heinous behavior of the Lebanese security forces towards demonstrators, hence my temptation to include the video above from Human Rights Watch.

Lebanon is a failing state. It was failing even before the August 4 explosion that devastated a large part of the city center near the port. Such states offer profit opportunities to whoever holds power, while impoverishing everyone else. It is no easy task to help such a country without helping its power elite.

Randa and I offer in the Foreign Affairs piece a combination of two ideas for rebuilding the destroyed area: a contractual relationship for reconstruction and an internationally controlled but Lebanese-staffed “authority” to set priorities and do most of the actual contracting. The “contract” idea has often been used in recent years, at various levels of operation: the Millennium Challenge Corporation we site does it at the project level. The Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund does it at a higher policy level. The European Union does it with candidate members. It amounts to conditionality: you get the money only if you do such and such.

The wise choice of “such and such,” and the willingness to follow through on the conditionality, are key elements of this approach. If our approach were to be adopted, the focus should be mainly on economic policy reform as well as transparency and accountability for government expenditure. But that creates an obvious problem: the international community would be asking for reforms from a central government that would not suffer any direct loss if aid were to be cut off. I think the importance of Beirut reconstruction to the government would be sufficient to mitigate this mismatch, but I’m in favor of examining downsides of any policies I suggest.

The idea of an International Beirut Reconstruction Authority is the more innovative of our propositions. Something like it existed in Sarajevo during the 1992/95 Bosnian war, but its capability was limited due to the siege and continued fighting. Randa and I cite the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, but the entity we have in mind is more hands-on than that. It would actually contract for and execute the reconstruction, as independently of the Lebanese government as feasible. Critics will say that proposition would weaken the Lebanese government. I would suggest the government has even more important things to do by way of economic and political reform.

We went light on the political reform piece, which is fraught. Lebanon is in form a democracy. If only technically competent people formed the government, they would likely have little connection to the political forces in the parliament, whose cooperation is necessary for many reforms. Meaningful political reform would give less weight to Lebanon’s sectarian political organizations, including Hezbollah, and more to its vibrant and competent civil society, including the demonstrators abused in the above video. Shifting power in that way is an enormous challenge, even in a small country. And it will have to be Lebanese who design a political system that delivers more to citizens and less to sectarian leaders.

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Serbia’s turn East

Posted in Daniel Serwer - August 15, 2020 - 0 Comment

The indicators are multiple:

Aleksandar Vucic, one-time Information Minister to Slobodan Milosevic and now in his second term as President of Serbia, was always an unlikely vehicle of democratization and Europeanization. But some of us (that means me too) thought it possible he would do the right thing, if only because nothing else really makes sense and his credibility with Serbia’s nationalists was high. Serbia’s road to prosperity and security, we thought, lies in Brussels, not Moscow. Nixon to China and all that.

We had it wrong. Prosperity and security are not Vucic’s real concerns. His own hold on power is. Vucic has been centralizing power, aided by an inept and divided political opposition. Like his Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic, he is far more comfortable with the Russian and Chinese autocracies than with Washington and Brussels. He has undermined independent media and slow-rolled judicial reform. Separation of powers is a joke–Vucic holds all of them. He allies himself with the Belgrade Church and its right-wing supporters. He has become palsy with Milorad Dodik, despite his understandable distaste for Dodik’s ambition to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, since that would put Serbia in a dicey situation.

Vucic is no longer “sitting on two stools.” It is amusing to see that some people imagine that they can still convince him to opt for the West. He has chosen the East, but we are not in the midst of the Cold War. The Balkans is no longer a major arena for great power competition. It barely rates as a minor one. Tito’s nonaligned fence-sitting served Western purposes. There is no fence now. The EU and the US shouldn’t care if Vucic goes East, and we shouldn’t try to buy him off. We need to be patient for the day when there is a Serbian leader who truly believes in liberal democracy and is prepared to sacrifice to take his country in that direction.

What does this mean for Kosovo? It means patience. Prime Minister Hoti is in no position to make territorial or other major concessions, as he faces real opposition in parliament. At least some Serbs are drifting in the right direction. Vucic, given his strong political position inside Serbia, could recognize Kosovo now with little impact on his re-election prospects in 2022. But if he doesn’t I can hope someone will emerge to challenge him precisely on this point: do you want a friendly southern neighbor, or a hostile one? Do you want Serbs to be safe in Kosovo or in danger? Do you want to qualify for EU membership faster or slower?

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Serbian civil society under attack

Posted in Daniel Serwer - July 31, 2020 - 0 Comment

Civil society and media organizations in Serbia are facing a government crackdown by means of financial investigations designed for preventing terrorism. Two hundred and thirty (230!) of them have issued the following protest against this government effort to squelch the remnants of Serbia’s post-Milosevic democracy. The US Embassy has protested, politely but firmly. Some EU parliamentarians have also spoken up. Much louder and more persistent protests will be required to get President Vucic and Prime Minister Brnabic to block and reverse this abuse. How about a statement from Foggy Bottom and from the European Council or the Commission?

Civil society and media will not give up the fight for a democratic and free Serbia

The media and civil society organizations demand from the Ministry of Finance and the Administration for the Prevention of Money Laundering to immediately present the grounds for suspicion due to which they ordered the extraordinary collection of information about organizations, media, and individuals from the commercial banks. The article of the law, referred to by the director of the Administration for the Prevention of Money Laundering, states that such inspection should be performed exclusively for organizations for which there are grounds for suspicion of their involvement in the financing of terrorism. Since the list includes numerous organizations and individuals dealing with investigative journalism, protection of human rights, transparency, film production, development of democracy, rule of law and philanthropy, the conclusion is that this is a political abuse of institutions and a dangerous attempt to further collapse the rule of law in Serbia.

The abuse of legal mechanisms and institutions to unlawfully put pressure on the media and civil society organizations is a drastic attack on freedom of association and freedom of information. For years, the government in Serbia has been facing serious criticism from both international and domestic organizations regarding the threat to these two important freedoms. Such an attack on organizations that advocate for establishing Serbia as a state governed by the rule of law with respect for the law and a genuine fight against corruption, is an additional argument that these values are seriously endangered in Serbia. Organizations, media and citizens will not give up the fight for a free and democratic state, regardless of threats and pressures. Such and similar moves by the authorities only further motivate us as citizens to persevere in the defense of our own country.

The media and organizations will take all appropriate legal actions against those involved in this abuse, including the prosecution of those responsible, but above all they will insist on complete and clear answers on how this could have happened. We remind the public that the organizations and media from the list are subject to various types of regular state control, including inspections and rigorous checks of financial operations by the Tax Administration and the National Bank of Serbia, as well as by their own donors. Any legal inspection of the work of organizations is welcome and we will always support it. On the other hand, we will fiercely oppose the abuse of institutions and procedures, because that is our mission – the fight for a democratic and legal state.

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High level ho hum

Posted in Daniel Serwer - July 29, 2020 - 0 Comment

The Atlantic Council today unveiled at a Western Balkans Partnership Summit its latest product. Some readers may remember that I panned a previous “Balkans Forward” report. This new one suffers none of the faults I cited then. It is a high-level step in a good direction: a statement signed by presidents and prime ministers in favor of economic integration among the Western Balkans 6 (or WB6: that’s North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Serbia) and integration of that region with the European Union. Too bad–and symptomatic of underlying political problems–that they did not sign it, but instead put it out as “the chair’s” conclusions. Not clear to me who the chair was.

The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s produced five of the WB6, three of which had to fight for independence. It was only natural that newly independent states, and new states in a conflicted neighborhood, would put up border fences and controls where there had been none previously. Albania, an adversary of Socialist Yugoslavia and one of the most isolated countries in the world during the Cold War, already had tough border controls. The result was economic fragmentation in the former Yugoslav space and beyond that has persisted far beyond any serious security threats.

Jim O’Brien at the Partnership Summit cited a figure of 10% of WB6 GDP lost to long waiting times, documentation issues, infrastructure bottlenecks, and other barriers to integration. The Covid-19 pandemic makes these particularly unfortunate, he argued, as the WB6 have an opportunity to gain more investment as the EU seeks to shorten its supply lines and improve its economic resilience. The WB6, located between the main body of the EU and Greece, could benefit as a result.

Presidents and Prime Ministers of the WB6 have now committed to reduce delays at their borders, cut red tape that increases trade friction, and build much-needed infrastructure to improve connectivity. Favorable bilateral arrangements are supposed to be automatically available to all 6, a kind of “most-favored nation” provision. Donors–including the EU, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the US Development Finance Corporation–have committed to finance the effort. Money, as the EBRD representative at the meeting suggested, should be no object, not least because the EU has already committed 13.5 billion euros to the region to counter the Covid-19 impact. The President of Serbia and the Prime Minister of Albania propose monthly meetings at their level to monitor implementation. Progress will also be checked at the Berlin Process Summit planned for Sofia in the fall.

All of this is good, if rather mundane. As Albanian Prime Minister Rama put it, small steps can add up to big things. “Green lanes,” which by EU definition delay shipments less than 15 minutes at a border, are to be instituted among the WB6 and several of the leaders want them instituted between the WB6 and the EU. Infrastructure projects are to be made “shovel ready.” Operations of the Central European Free Trade Agreement, to which the WB6 are all parties, are to be improved and expanded to intellectual property and environment. Phytosanitary certificates are to be harmonized. Chambers of commerce are to be involved in monitoring implementation. The existing Regional Coordination Council will ride herd to keep things moving.

The barriers to achieving these and bigger steps toward integration are real. As Serbian President Vucic noted, it has taken 7 or 8 years to even get ready to begin work on the Nis/Pristina part of a highway that has been finished between Pristina and Durres (in Albania) for that entire time. He was not sanguine about removing existing barriers to trade between Kosovo and Serbia, which exist mainly on his own side of the border for political rather than economic reasons. Transportation agreements between Serbia and Kosovo supposedly negotiated by US envoy Grenell went unmentioned (or at least I didn’t hear them mentioned), I suppose because they are not implemented. I heard no commitment by Bosnia and Herzegovina Prime Minister Tegeltija to accepting Kosovo passports for visa-free travel.

The fact is that the barriers to economic integration are not all bureaucratic. Almost any trade issue can be seen through the lense of national sovereignty and political convenience. Domestic politicians will seek to gain advantage from battering the powers that be for perceived softness toward a disliked state or ethnicity. Serbia has lots of non-tariff barriers that block imports and travel from Kosovo. Bosnia does as well. For both, the reasons are political, not economic. Until the 2018 agreement (Prespa) between North Macedonia and Greece, the road to Thessaloniki was not freely available to North Macedonian trade and talks are still ongoing to remove barriers. Not to mention the EU’s refusal so far to implement the visa-free travel for Kosovo that Pristina earned by implementing more than 100 technical requirements. But the political stars have not yet aligned.

I might add: sometimes political stars don’t align because someone who benefits from trade barriers doesn’t want them to. The barriers among the WB6 present enormous opportunities for corruption: I doubt the smugglers have much trouble getting through, because they are ready and willing to pay. There might even be one or two leaders among the WB6 who benefit from the payoffs.

So yes, regional economic integration presents enormous opportunities. But it is yet to be shown that the WB6 are prepared to look past the political barriers and get the job done. That is why participation of the leaders is needed for ho-hum problems: only they can waive the political obstacles and go for the economic benefits. I won’t be surprised if they hesitate, so the EU and US will need to be ready to intervene with political muscle as well as hard cash from time to time. Let’s hope it works.

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Geopolitics in the Balkans

Posted in Daniel Serwer - July 28, 2020 - 1 Comment

I prepared this lecture for a presentation earlier in the summer, but circumstances conspired to prevent me from giving it. So I’m letting it sit here, for anyone who might be interested:

It is a pleasure to be with you remotely, even if I do wish we were all in Dubrovnik. It was not a stop on my many flights into Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia. I was lucky even to see Split, where my UN flight landed once when the Serbs were making it impossible to do so in Sarajevo.

  • The world has changed dramatically since then. So have the Western Balkans.
  • Let me start there. You will hear from many people who live in the Western Balkans, especially in Bosnia and Serbia, that nothing has changed.
  • This reflects their disappointment in what has happened in the last 25 years. I share that disappointment. I would like to have seen far more progress.
  • But it is not objectively true that things haven’t changed. Per capita GDP is on average at least twice as high as it was before the 1990s wars. Apart from Covid-19, it is safe to travel throughout former Yugoslavia, regardless of ethnic identity or national origins. You can say pretty much whatever you want in all the former Yugoslav republics and in Albania, even if organizing politically and publishing are still not entirely free in several countries. Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims worship freely, often in renovated churches and mosques.
  • The question is how this progress was achieved, and why does it appear to have come to a halt sometime in the middle of the first decade of this millennium.
  • The 1990s, we know now, were truly the unipolar moment, when the US had no rivals and together with Europe could do what it wanted in the Balkans and much of the rest of the world.
  • With a lot of help from Croatia, NATO used force to end the Bosnian war and compel Serbia’s withdrawal from Kosovo in 1999. The US and EU also negotiated the end of an Albanian rebellion in Macedonia in 2001, with NATO backing.
  • Washington and Brussels then together invested massive financial and personnel resources in Bosnia and Kosovo. The former was eventually run by a European with US support and the latter became a UN protectorate run by Europeans with American deputies. Their mandate in Bosnia was to install a sovereign, democratic government. In Kosovo, it was to build self-governing democratic institutions, with a view to eventually solving the sovereignty question.
  1. Macedonia remained self-governing, but with European and American monitoring and sometimes financing of its 2001 Ohrid agreement.
  1. The unipolar moment began to end with the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the US responses in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the Balkan successes encouraged.
  1. But the joint US/EU state-building processes in Bosnia and Kosovo had significant momentum and continued. So too did the peace implementation in Macedonia.
  1. The process stalled in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2006, when the parliament failed to approve by the required two-thirds constitutional changes the Americans and Europeans wanted.
  1. In Kosovo, the UN first imposed a program of “standards before status” and “later standards with status,” leading eventually to supervised independence in 2007, after which progress slowed.
  1. In Macedonia, political and economic reform lasted a bit longer, perhaps through 2008, but the financial crisis that hit Europe and the US hard in that year made the going much slower.
  1. The Balkans have not had an easy time of it since. All the Balkan states are heavily dependent on EU economic growth. The Greek financial crisis and economic collapse, the flood of immigrants after 2011 from the greater Middle East, and the Brexit referendum in 2016 gave Europe more urgent and higher priority problems than the Balkans.
  1. These developments also made Europe more cautious about the prospects for enlargement.
  1. Brussels began to slow roll accession, which in turn slowed the necessary economic and political reforms. Would-be autocrats faced much less challenge than they would have in the 1990s.
  1. In Bosnia, some politicians returned to the virulent ethnic nationalist rhetoric of wartime, with little constraint imposed by Washington or Brussels. The country is now stalled in its own constitutional contradictions, imposed by Washington and Brussels.
  • In Kosovo, the economy has done relatively well, after an initial spurt the authorities managed to limit Islamist radicalization, the courts began to prosecute some high-level corruption cases, interethnic crime dropped dramatically, the army is now getting support from NATO, and there have been several peaceful, if sometimes turbulent, transfers of power.
  • Kosovo now faces its greatest post-independence challenge: the pending indictment at the Specialist Chambers in The Hague, a nominally Kosovo court run by the Americans and Europeans, of the President, the head of the political party he founded, and eight other still unnamed Kosovo Liberation Army fighters.
  • In Macedonia, a one-time economic reformer unable to deliver reform after 2008 or so gave the country a political nightmare that was finally dispelled with help from U.S. and European muscle, leading eventually to an agreement with Greece to change its name to North Macedonia and allow it to become a candidate for EU accession as well as a member of NATO.
  • In the meanwhile, Croatia, became a member of the EU, Serbia began to normalize its relations with Kosovo, and Montenegro managed to get into NATO and put itself in pole position for EU membership.
  • In short, things are a lot better in the Balkans than they were in the 1990s, even if progress is slow and serious trouble spots remain.
  • Today’s world is however dramatically different from the one that existed in the 1990s.
  • While still globally dominant, the US faces regional challenges from China, Russia, Iran and even North Korea that take priority in Washington over the Balkans.
  • The Balkans in general, and Bosnia and Kosovo in particular, were the objects of top-tier attention in the 1990s. They now get much lower priority.
  • That is true in Europe as well, where Brexit, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and illegal immigration are issues that, each in its own way, cast a shadow over Balkan aspirations to join Europe. 
  • At the same time, Moscow and Beijing are paying more attention than ever before to the Balkans.
  • The Russians are interfering blatantly by both violent and nonviolent means in the region: assassination, media manipulation, renting crowds, and financing political parties are all being used to slow if not halt Balkan progress towards NATO and the EU.
  • The Chinese are using their financial strength to loan, build and buy. Caveat emptor of course, though Beijing’s behavior is a lot more salubrious than Moscow’s and likely to produce some positive results for those Balkan countries and companies that know how to do business.
  • It comes however with political strings attached: the Chinese will expect those who get their money to toe the line on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Uighurs, and Covid-19.
  • Turkey—also a strong force in the Balkans for historical, geographic, and cultural reasons—has taken a dramatic turn in a more Islamist and autocratic direction.
  • The secular Turkey that contributed well-trained forces to NATO interventions in the 1990s has all but vanished. Erdogan’s Turkey is building mosques, capturing Gulenists, and encouraging political Islam while still trying to maintain its previous good relations with non-Muslim countries in the Balkans.
  • How does all this affect the Balkan countries?
  • The Turkish influence is direct and palpable.
  • In Bosnia, it is exercised mainly through Bakir Izetbegovic, now head of the leading Islamist political party.
  • Though still largely secular in orientation, Kosovo is far more Islamic than it once was and has cooperated with the capture and rendering of Gulenists. President Thaci treasures his relationship with President Erdogan.
  • China has focused its attention mainly on Serbia and Montenegro, the former by buying assets and the latter by building an important highway.
  • Most Kosovars might welcome more interest in investment from Beijing. I wouldn’t fault them for that but only urge caution about the financial and political conditions, which can be onerous.
  • But Beijing doesn’t like break-away provinces. Perhaps because of that, Japan is showing some interest in Kosovo and should be able to provide far better deals.
  • Russia is still far more politically important to Serbia than China, because it holds the veto in the Security Council over Kosovo membership in the UN. Belgrade has tried to continue its non-aligned hedging between the West and East, even though it claims the ambition of joining the EU. It buys arms from Moscow but trains more with NATO.
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The virus is not the only epidemic

Posted in Daniel Serwer - July 22, 2020 - 0 Comment

A friend in Serbia has called this statement by the European Movement International to my attention. Parts of it apply as well to the United States, as well as elsewhere:

Ever since the start of the COVID pandemic, regimes in Europe and around the world have used the current crisis to compromise democratic principles. Recent events in Serbia are consistent with that trend and constitute a negative development for democracy and civic space in a country that has been on the path to EU accession for a while but where democracy has been in rapid decline for years.

The Serbian government’s management of the health crisis has raised many questions. Its decision to hold large public events and go ahead with the national elections, in the peak of a health crisis, confounded many and made the imposition of draconian lockdown measures right after the elections seem politically motivated. In a country ablaze with suspicion that the data on infections and deaths caused by COVID-19 has been manipulated by those in power, trust was already low. 

In such an atmosphere, it is citizens’ fundamental right to hold their government to account. The wave of protests instigated by young people and joined by citizens from all walks of life, is a manifestation of the Serbs’ wish to voice their legitimate concerns about the government’s handling of its response to the pandemic. Their right to protest should neither be denied, nor met with violence. Trying to silence protesters and journalists through the exercise of force is a violation of fundamental rights. Similarly, the freedom to protest should not be highjacked by a small minority of protesters’ intent to soil that right with the use of violence.

After years of steady descent away from European democratic norms, the current political unrest that has engulfed Serbia is not a symptom of the health crisis. It is the result of deeper, much further-reaching structural and democratic shortcomings in the country.

It is imperative that measures adopted by the Serbian government during the health emergency remain proportional to the threat of the crises and that they respect democratic values. Citizens require openness about the decisions that affect them and wish to be involved in the response to a health crisis that has cost far too many lives. Civil society and the media should be given a strong, independent role in keeping in check the country’s path towards recovery. 

Beyond the pandemic, democratic and structural reforms, that will safeguard inclusive and transparent decision-making, strengthened by an independent media and permitting dialogue with civil society, are vital to regain citizens’ trust and keep a trajectory towards a European future.

The transformative power of European integration has at its core the need for demonstrating respect for the rule of law and fundamental democratic principles in Serbia, according to the EU’s founding values. The EU must ensure that the Serbian government lives up to its responsibilities in the context of the accession negotiations.

The European Union is a community of values based on fundamental and human rights. The EU and its institutions as well as member states and non-state actors must make a stronger and more targeted effort to uphold and promote European values and fundamental rights in member states and candidate countries.

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