Im Vorfeld des Gipfels zwischen den EU- und den Balkanländern wird deutlich, dass die österreichische Ratspräsidentschaft nicht den spektakulären Integrationsschub in der Region bewirkt hat wie viele gehofft hatten, sagt Vedran Dzihic und T.K. Vogel in Transitions Online.
Quite a few countries of the Western Balkans had high expectations before Austria assumed the rotating European Union presidency at the start of the year. Serbia, which a decade ago blamed the EU for the breakup of Yugoslavia, hoped that Austria would smooth its way into the union. Croatia and Bosnia, while at very different stages of the integration process, thought that their close historical links – both countries were once parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire – would give a boost to their membership bids under the Austrian presidency.
Austria responded to this bout of trans-alpine affection with characteristic restraint. “The EU is certainly in a position to offer a substantial contribution” to the reform process in the region, an Austrian top diplomat told the European Parliament in mid-February. “The EU will continue doing so, as it has in the past.” These were not the words of a presidency with a stirring vision for the war-torn region.
A summit to be held between the EU and the countries of the Western Balkans in the Austrian city of Salzburg on 10-11 March is now likely to reaffirm the EU’s, and Austria’s, cautious approach towards the Western Balkans.
A decisive year
It did not always look as though Austria would be content with simply continuing the EU’s traditional technocratic approach, which had shunned robust conditionality and instead espoused the soft power of generous funding and technical assistance to domestic reform processes. (In Bosnia and Macedonia, police and peacekeeping missions were added to the mix, and insistence on reform was more vigorous.)
Indeed, the soft-power approach has yielded remarkable results: a largely peaceful though woefully underdeveloped region that uniformly wants to reform in order to enter the EU.
This approach had first been articulated at a 2003 summit in Thessaloniki, which offered the prospect of eventual membership – however distant – to the Balkan countries in return for reform.
While the United Kingdom was quite eager to push the enlargement agenda during its presidency in the second half of 2005, there were good reasons to expect the Austrian presidency to be even more active – not least because of the momentous changes likely to occur in the Balkans over the course of the year.
For the Western Balkans, 2006 is a decisive year.
In May, Montenegro will hold a referendum on independence from the state union with Serbia, which if approved will create yet another country knocking at the EU’s door.
Serbia itself has been hoping to sign a stabilization and association agreement (SAA) with the EU before the end of the year, a plan that now hangs in the balance as the EU is threatening to suspend negotiations due to Serbia’s failure to transfer war-crimes indictees, most prominently Bosnian Serb wartime commander Ratko Mladic, to the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The issue is likely to come to the fore in late March, when the EU will need to decide whether to proceed with the next round of SAA talks scheduled for 4-5 April.
Ambitious plans to amend the current Bosnian constitution, unveiled with much fanfare in Washington during a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of the Dayton peace accord last November, have produced somewhat disappointing results and make it unlikely that 2006 will be the year in which Bosnians finally get a workable constitution that unites rather than divides the country. Nevertheless, the fall of the hard-line government in Bosnia’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity and the general election coming up in October will keep Bosnia’s transition from post-war recovery to EU association firmly on the Brussels agenda, especially as Bosnia hopes to complete its own SAA by the end of the year.
The most important of these developments are without any doubt the negotiations on the final status of Kosovo, which is still nominally a part of Serbia and Montenegro. The talks are expected to lead to some form of independence before the year is over. While the talks are not formally an EU initiative, Austria is hosting the secretariat of the UN special envoy for the status talks, former Finnish president Marti Ahtisaari. His deputy Albert Rohan is a top Austrian diplomat.
To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.