EU ‘Agreeing to Disagree’ on Balkans Holds Dangers

The uneven policies of EU countries towards enlargement in the Western Balkans and Turkey are sending the wrong message to the region.

Member states of the European Union are now displaying a distinct tendency towards disagreeing with one another in public over enlargement. The tendency has gained strength as the club has grown from six to 27 members, and as the process of accommodating the newcomers’ various views and interests has become more difficult.

Although the circumstances of the last waves of enlargement in 2004 and 2007 differ completely from those in the first four waves, between 1973 and 1995, the basic motives driving the existing EU members and prospective members has not changed that much.

Would-be members still tend to see EU membership as a means to access development and other benefits, while – when assessing these candidates – existing members remain guided by their own national interests and the concerns of the bloc as a whole.

Within limits, this tendency to “agree to disagree” may rightly be seen as a normal feature of such a complex process as EU enlargement. Moreover, until now, the waves of EU enlargement generally have taken place within these limits. Hence, no amount of internal EU bargaining over an individual country’s accession has jeopardized the process.

However, the process of integrating the Western Balkans and Turkey is likely to see the phenomenon of “agreeing to disagree” taken to new limits.

The reason is not simply that the 27 member states are already having a hard time accommodating their own interests to those of the EU and its potential members. It is also because the Western Balkan countries and Turkey have the potential to trigger much weightier clashes among EU members.

As the integration process of the region enters a more advanced stage, signs of growing nervousness are now clearly visible among EU members.

Normally, this anxiety would not result in any prospective state being refused membership. However, Turkish membership is still under a question mark as far as certain EU members are concerned. Namely, for this country, accession to the EU now involves not only meeting the concrete conditions for full membership but satisfying the criteria imposed by the debate on whether and to what degree a European country is in fact “European”.

This lack of common ground among member states over diverse aspects of the Balkan integration process would not be a major issue as long as it conformed to the standard pattern of “agreeing to disagree”.

Slovenia’s opposition to the completion of accession negotiations with Croatia has offered one example of this. Montenegro’s and Albania’s integration processes have also prompted a debate, leading to a decision to postpone consideration of their applications for membership, even though neither Montenegro nor Albania has been responsible for any major negative or unmanageable developments in or among the EU states.

Surprisingly, the Netherlands is the only EU country that has been trying to impose a condition on Serbia – namely, its obligation to cooperate with the Hague war crimes tribunal, ICTY. Until December 2009, the Dutch blocked the entry into force of Serbia’s Interim Agreement with the EU. However, the Dutch objection to Serbia was proportionally justifiable in the context of EU conditionality.

Hence, in this case, the phenomenon of “agreeing to disagree” among EU members was still kept within normal bounds, as it involved an attempt to impose a standard, not an individual member’s national interest.

Unlike these “normal” disagreements and bargaining between the member states, the EU is doing less well with the rest of the region. Macedonia’s accession negotiations with the EU have been held up for almost five years as a result of the dispute with Greece over its name, to which Athens objects.

Unfortunately, the EU’s inability to pressure Greece to respect a 1995 accord, which stipulates that Athens may not block bids by Macedonia to join international organisations, has also encouraged the growth of more radical nationalistic positions in Macedonia.

Meanwhile, in addition to meeting the skepticism of almost half of Europe as an EU candidate, Turkey must now deal also with threats from existing EU member Bulgaria. This is because Sofia has lodged demands for Turkey to compensate Bulgarians expelled from Thrace just before the First World War. Although this event took place almost a century ago, Sofia will most likely make meeting the demand a condition of Turkey’s eventual accession, whenever this happens.

In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it has been easy for EU officials to blame this country’s slow integration process on its internal disagreements. However, by adopting a passive approach towards Bosnia and by failing to encourage a more supportive regional cooperation environment, especially on the part of Serbia and Croatia, the EU is not helping matters.

The case of Kosovo, meanwhile, the newest reality in the Balkans, underlines the EU’s failure to build a common approach and offer a clear EU perspective to potential members.

The challenges facing the Balkans involve not only EU accession, of course, but improving regional cooperation and neighbourly relations. However, better than any other international factor – through its powerful instrument of perspective membership – the EU can positively influence the development of relations between the Balkan countries.

In this sense, the EU’s challenge is to manage the region’s negative potential to complicate its own integration processes. In the past decade, this potential has been moderately accommodated within the EU’s principle of conditionality under the Stabilization and Association Process. Furthermore, the Balkan countries have so far succeeded in absorbing the consequence of the phenomenon of “agreeing to disagree” among the EU members.

However, if this phenomenon starts to exceed the bounds of what has hitherto been considered normal, Balkan countries may start to lose interest in the incentives of EU integration. In this context, EU members may find they can no longer afford the luxury of debates on “how European” a country is, or continue their unrealistic attitude towards the new realities in the Balkans and their passive approach towards solving its concerns.

Gjergji Vurmo is the Director of the Centre for European and Security Affairs at the Tirana-based Institute for Democracy and Mediation.Balkan Insight is BIRN’s online publication.