What about EU Enlargement Leverage and the Democratization of the Western Balkans?

Transcription

1 Dr Milenko Petrovic 1 University of Canterbury Christchurch, NZ (milenko.petrovic@canterbury.ac.nz) What about EU Enlargement Leverage and the Democratization of the Western Balkans? Paper prepared for the 8 th Pan-European Conference on the European Union, Standing Group on the EU (SGEU) Trento, June 2016 (Draft Version Not for Citation) Abstract More than a decade after the EU officially offered the opportunity for accession and a potential EU future to the post-communist countries of the Western Balkans, the level of consolidation of democratic institutions and general socio-political stability achieved in these countries can hardly be considered satisfactory. The level of corruption, respect for the rule of law, freedom of the media and general indicators of achieved democratization in the Western Balkan states are still significantly behind those achieved in the post-communist states which joined the EU in 2004 and Indeed in some countries, particularly in Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina they show a clear tendency of worsening. Not denying the impacts of some domestic factors, this paper argues that the main reasons for the insufficient impact of the EU accession process on the post-communist democratization of the Western Balkan states are primarily related to the lack of real interest among the core EU member states in further accessions after the emergence of enlargement fatigue in the mid- 2000s. Consequently, the tougher accession conditions adopted for the Western Balkan states have proven to be rather arbitrary and inconsistent to those which were used in the 2004/07 enlargement round while the EU assistance offered for meeting these additional conditions has been inadequate and insufficient to support consolidation of democracy in these countries. While the question of whether, or how and under what conditions, the EU could promote democratization and liberalizing reforms in its broader geographic neighbourhood remains an important part of scholarly discussions on the scope and limits of EU foreign policy, the positive impact of EU enlargement conditionality on post-communist democratization is an indisputable historical fact that has been recognized in a large body of scholarship (see e.g. 1 Senior Lecturer Above the Bar, National Centre for Research on Europe and Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies

2 Bideleux, 2001; Grabbe, 2006; Pridham, 2001 and 2005; Schimmelfennig, 2008; Schimmelfennig et al and Vachudova, 2005). Nevertheless, more than a decade after the EU officially offered the opportunity for accession and a potential EU future to the post-communist countries of the Western Balkans 2, the level of consolidation of democratic institutions and general socio-political stability achieved in these countries can hardly be considered satisfactory. The level of corruption, respect for the rule of law, freedom of the media and general indicators of achieved democratization in the Western Balkan states including Croatia, which has been an EU member since 2013 are still significantly behind those achieved in the post-communist states which joined the EU in 2004 and While many scholars (particularly those from the structuralist camp ), 3 EU officials, and political analysts tend to explain the Western Balkan states slower progress with post-communist reform and EU accession in comparison to the countries of East Central Europe (ECE) and the Baltics as being more or less an expected outcome of the different structural capacities of these groups of states to adopt EU ( Western ) values and norms, and consequently meet EU accession conditions, this paper focuses on the importance of practical policy measures in this regard. Not denying the impacts of some domestic factors, the paper argues that the main reasons for the insufficient impact of the EU accession process on the post-communist democratization of the Western Balkan states are primarily related to the lack of real interest among the core EU member states in further accessions after they started to feel enlargement fatigue in the mid-2000s. After an overview of the recent state of democratization and general socio-political conditions in the Western Balkan states provided in Section 1, Sections 2 and 3 analyse the scope and negative effects of the EU s policy incentives (or lack of them) and accession requirements towards the Western Balkan states which were introduced after it adopted a changed and tougher approach towards its further enlargement in the mid-2000s. 1. Socio-political conditions and challenges in the Western Balkan states The positive trends in the fast democratization of the Western Balkan states, which started with the introduction of a new EU strategy of conditionality and [a] gradual approach 4 in the late 1990s that was quickly transformed into the so-called Stabilization and association process (SAP) for the Western Balkans and resulted in the second democratization of the two largest countries in the region - Serbia (then with Montenegro) and Croatia - 5 did not last 2 The encouraging conclusions of several EU Council and European Council meetings from the early 2000s on the bright prospects of all the Western Balkan states culminated in the adoption of the Thessaloniki Agenda in 2003 which declared that all the Western Balkan states will [ultimately] be an integral part of united Europe (EU General Affairs and External Relations Council, 2003, Art. 41). 3 Samuel Huntington (1993 and 1996) is the best known, but definitely not the only important author in this group. See eg.; Janos, 2000 and 2001; Kitchelt, 2003; Darden and Grzymała-Busse, 2006; Seroka, 2008 and Cirtautas and Schimmelfennig, 2010). 4 in offering EU cooperation and assistance for peace and stability, economic renewal, democracy and [mutual] cooperation (EU General Affairs Council, 1997, Annex III; see also Pippan, 2004). 5 After the death of Croatia s authoritarian president Tudjman in December 1999 and the overthrow of Serbia s post-communist dictator Milosevic in October the following year. 2

3 long. Due to the negative effects of global democracy trends 6 coupled with the longstanding negative socio-economic impacts of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/2009 and even more so with some extraordinary challenging domestic socio-political conditions as well as a lack of EU enlargement leverage in finding a solution (see Section 3), none of the Western Balkan states have been able to significantly improve their level of democratization since the mid- 2000s. While there have been some important improvements in the fight against corruption, particularly in the three most advanced (or democratized) countries in the region (Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia), which were also able to maintain or even slightly improve their Freedom House NIT democracy scores, all the other states in the region with the partial exception of Kosovo have worsened their performance in this area over the last ten years (see Table 1). Despite being able to slightly improve its democracy score (but not the corruption index) in the last few years, the least democratized country in the region, Kosovo, still remains at the level of semi-consolidated autocracy, according to the NIT s classification of national democratization levels. 7 While in comparison to negative trends in other postcommunist states, particularly in the Eurasian post-soviet states, as well as in countries such as Hungary and Slovakia, which were declared consolidated democracies even before they became full EU members in 2004, such a state of play in the Western Balkan states in general could be assessed as acceptable (or even satisfactory), the lack of progress in consolidation, and the deterioration of democratic institutions in Albania, and particularly Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina 8, and Macedonia, has become very significant. The problems in the democratization of these countries could possibly be assessed as less serious, or more or less expected, if these countries had not been included in the EU accession process and the EU s (conditional) assistance for democratic and post-communist socio-economic reforms, as was the case with the non-baltic post-soviet states, all of which (with only the partial exception of 6 Recently there has been a strong impression among observers and mainstream analysts that democracy is losing ground and that authoritarianism has been increasing globally. While the Journal of Democracy has devoted two of its issues in 2015 to this topic: The Authoritarian Resurgence (vol. 26, No. 2, April 2015) and Authoritarianism Goes Globally (Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2015), the last issue of Freedom House s Nations in Transit of June 2015 was entitled: Democracy on the Defensive in Europe and Eurasia. 7 The Nations in Transit publication looks at the state of play of political rights, civil liberties, corruption, the rule of law, media, civil society and the electoral process in all of the post-communist countries in the world and rates each of these variables from 1 (the highest level of progress) to 7 (the lowest level of progress). The average democracy scores (DS) then classify the countries into one of the following groups: from 1 to 2.99 Consolidated Democracies; from 3 to 3.99 Semi-Consolidated Democracies; from 4 to 4.99 Transitional or Hybrid Regimes; from 5 to 5.99 Semi-Consolidated Authoritarian Regimes; and from 6 to 7 Consolidated Authoritarian Regimes. 8 In addition to Bosnia and Herzegovina, this country will be interchangeably referred to as Bosnia-Herzegovina or B-H in this text. 3

4 Table 1. Indicators of democratization in post-communist Europe East-Central Europe and the Baltic states DSˡ TICPI² DSˡ TICPI² DSˡ TICPI² DSˡ TICPI² DSˡ TICPI² Czech Republic Hungary Poland Slovenia Slovakia Estonia Latvia Lithuania South-Eastern Europe Albania Bosnia and Herz 5.42 N/A Bulgaria Croatia Kosovo N/A N/A 5.36 N/A Montenegro 5.50 N/A 3.93 N/A FYR Macedonia Romania Serbia Eurasian States Armenia Azerbaijan Belarus Georgia Moldova Ukraine Russia ˡ FH Nations in Transit s democracy scores (DS - see footnote 6) are published annually in June. As such, they show the state of play in the respective countries during the previous year, which means that the democracy scores given in the above table for particular years (e.g. 2015) are actually published in the NIT publication for the following year (2016 in this case). ²Transparency International s Corruption Perception Index (TICPI) is published annually in December and gives information about the corruption level in each country of the world for that calendar year. Since 2012 the TICPI has ranged from 100 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt), while in the period until 2011 it ranged from 10 (very clean) to 1 (highly corrupt). Although it is already included in the NIT s democracy scores, the level of corruption in the respective countries as measured by the TICPI is also given here as a separate indicator for simplicity s sake, it has been converted to a 100-to-0 scale for all years shown in the table in order to address the importance of this factor of democratization, which is often used as an expression of not only the existing level of corruption in the public sector but also as a reflection of the general stability of democratic institutions and the rule of law in the respective countries. Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova) have sunk in post-communist authoritarianism (see Table 1 and Freedom House s NIT 2015 data for other states not included in the table). However, the fact that all the Western Balkan states have been included in the above mentioned SAP process for almost two decades, and that the two least democratized states (Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina) have even been functioning as (more or less) EU protectorates or semi-protectorates for all that time, obviously has not contributed much to their successful democratization. As the discussion in Sections 2 and 3 will show, the level of EU assistance for reform that the Western Balkan states received after the EU changed its approach towards 4

5 further enlargements in the mid-2000s was in fact very moderate and effectively not much more than the assistance which the non-accessory post-communist states received (or did not receive) from the EU during the same period. As is more or less regularly repeated in EU Commission and Freedom House annual reports on the state of conditions in the individual countries of the Western Balkan region (see European Commission, various years and Freedom House, various years), the functioning of recently established democratic institutions in these countries is heavily burdened by administrative inefficiency and especially by weak judicial systems which are not able to eliminate the involvement of criminal activities and corruption in the work of these institutions. The destabilising impact of these political system weaknesses, which are by no means specific to the Western Balkans, 9 has been enormously strengthened and prolonged by the continuing existence of inter-ethnic problems and conflicts in and among the Western Balkan states. Leaving aside Albania, which continues to struggle with a very weak level of consolidation of democratic institutions and enormously high corruption, a major source of political instability in all three above identified Western Balkan states with the worst state of democracy remains the problematic and conflicting internal and external ethnic relations regarding the very constitutional definition of these countries. In addition to the problems in relation between Serbia and Kosovo regarding Kosovo s contested statehood status 10 and the ever-present high level of tensions between Kosovo s Albanian majority and Serbian ethnic minority, a very serious lack of inter-ethnic trust in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia continues to politically destabilise these countries as well as to threaten regional stability. While in Kosovo the ethnic animosities are linked to corruption which is similarly as in Albania of endemic proportions (Bogdani, 2015) and very similar in scale to the levels of corruption experienced in the semi-authoritarian and authoritarian regimes of the Eurasian states (see Table 1), ethnic mistrust in Macedonia, coupled with increased animosity between the evermore authoritarian government of Prime Minister Gruevski and the largest opposition party, has in recent years almost paralysed political life and the chance for further improvements in the functioning of democratic institutions in this country. The situation particularly worsened in March 2015 after the socalled wiretapping affair. Allegations and counter-allegations between the two main parties erupted when the leader of the oppositional Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), Zoran Zaev, who was himself at that time criminally accused by the government of conspiring with a foreign intelligence service to overthrow the government, presented a recorded conversation at a press conference which showed that Gruevski had issued orders to act against the law and illegally take out millions of loans abroad (Bechev, 2015). An attack 9 They remain a serious problem in many post-communist countries of the 2004/2007 EU enlargement, particularly in Romania, Bulgaria and those countries which worsened their democracy scores and corruption indexes in recent years (see Table 1). 10 Kosovo s independence (declared in February 2008) is still not officially recognised by Serbia, the United Nations and many other states (including five EU member states), but it is recognised by over 100 members of the UN and most other international organisations, such as the IMF, World Bank and (de facto) the EU itself. 5

6 on the police at a border post by Albanian separatists from Kosovo in April the same year, armed clashes with the same group in the border town of Kumanovo a few weeks later and huge opposition protests which lasted several days in May brought the political climate in the country to the brink of civil war (Bechev, 2015; BBC, 2015). The situation was brought back to quasi-normal only after negotiations led by EU Commissioner Hahn brokered an agreement between the four Macedonian major parties on a tender truce and the early elections in 2017 (European Commission, 2015). Similarly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when discussing the poor state of the national economy and the political standstill, the political representatives of all three ethnic groups continue to firstly blame the obstructions made by the political leadership of other ethnic groups and then international factors (particularly the EU and the USA) for not doing enough to prevent this obstruction. While the leaders of the Bosniak/Croat Federation, and particularly the ethnic Bosniaks, continue to excuse their poor governing performance by claiming that the non-functioning of federal institutions is due to the Dayton approach being too confederative, the Bosnian Serbs political leaders are preoccupied with defending their Dayton autonomy from such attacks. 11 In this regard, almost nothing has changed since the mid-2000s when G. Knaus and M. Cox (2004) identified these tendencies in the behaviour of the political leaders of the three core ethnic groups in B-H. 2. The EU and the Western Balkan states accession Twenty years after the end of civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and sixteen years after the second democratisation of Serbia and Croatia (which is a longer period than that from the collapse of communism in late 1989 to the accession to the EU of the first eight post-communist states on 1 May 2004), Croatia is the only Western Balkan state to have succeeded in joining the EU, doing so on 1 July Of the remaining candidates and potential candidates for EU membership from the Western Balkans, which have all signed association treaties with the EU 12 and (with the exception of Kosovo) have submitted their application for EU membership, only Montenegro and as of very recently (December 2015) Serbia have opened accession negotiations with the EU (Table 2). While the fact that until very recently Montenegro was the only EU candidate country from the Western Balkans 11 The civil/ethnic war in Bosnia and Herzegovina which broke out in April 1992 was terminated by the Dayton Peace Accords, which were initiated and agreed to in November and formally signed as The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina by the leaders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia in Paris on 14 December This Agreement established Bosnia and Herzegovina as a de-facto confederative state consisting of two semi-independent entities - the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (i.e. the Bosniak-Croat entity )- with a feeble federal Bosnian-Herzegovinian government (the agreement is available in full at 12 The so-called Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAA), which were basically similar to the Europe Agreements on primarily asymmetrical economic/trade concessions signed with the countries of the 2004/2007 enlargement in the early 1990s. However, the SAA contained additional requirements (the so-called Copenhagen-plus conditions) regarding stabilization, reconciliation and mutual cooperation among the post- Yugoslav states in accordance with the SAP, launched in 1999 (see Petrovic, Smith, 2013 for more details). 6

7 which was able to open some of the 35 acquis negotiating chapters (see Table 2) may seem surprising, it perfectly reflects the inconsistency and shortcomings in the changed EU approach to the accession of the Western Balkan states since The reasons for this are not only related to the longer or similar duration of the official EU candidate status of the other two candidates Macedonia (which got its status half a decade before Montenegro) and Serbia (which became an official EU candidate only 14 months after Montenegro see Table 2). They are more related to Montenegro s not very convincing democratic record, which is not only reflected in its definitely less than better (if not worse) democracy scores than in the other two above mentioned countries (Table 1), but also primarily in the fact that it is the only post-communist state in Europe which has never experienced an electoral change of ruling party or leader. 13 However, all this obviously did not play any role when EU leaders have made decisions regarding this country s progress in EU accession. While Macedonia is still waiting to officially launch its accession negotiations due to the only one bizarre reason discussed in Section 3, and Serbia opened its first chapters only in December 2015, despite its accession negotiations being officially launched almost two years before and only sixteen months after Montenegro (Table 2), the latter opened 20 negotiating chapters by the end of 2015, two of which have already been provisionally closed. Although they have never been as close to the EU as the post-communist states of East Central and Baltic Europe, relations between the EU and the Western Balkan states started worsening a couple of years before the outbreak of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, when the EU, under the pressure of emerging enlargement fatigue and fears for the EU s absorption/enlargement capacity in its key old member states (Phinnemore 2006; Petrovic 2009; Petrovic-Smith, 2013), decided to renew [the] consensus on enlargement (European Council, 2006, point 4), i.e. tighten accession conditions for new applicants. From that moment on, the basic objective of EU enlargement policy towards the Western Balkan states was not to further speed up the accession of these states, but rather to try to avoid mistakes from the previous enlargement rounds, particularly those related to the premature accession of Romania and Bulgaria (Vachudova, 2014; Grabbe, 2014). 14 The key points of this renewed consensus on enlargement considered an increase in the total number of acquis chapters from 31 to 35, a tightening of requirements for the closure of each chapter, and the introduction of a clause which defines the accession negotiations as an open-ended process whose outcome cannot be guaranteed beforehand (European Commission, 2005). In the following years the EU also began to prioritize the importance (and early opening) of the key chapters on the rule of law, institution-building and 13 Prime Minister Milo Djukanović and his Democratic Party of Montenegrin Socialists (formerly the League of Montenegrin Communists) have been in power throughout the whole period of post-communist (and even the last few years of communist) history of the country. Djukanović himself has served six terms as prime minister and one as president of the country during this period. In several occasions (last time in October and November 2015) there have been organized large street protests led by the opposition against the alleged government corruption and mafia style rule of the thief Milo (see e.g. BBC, 2015; Hopkins, 2012 and Vacudova, 2014). 14 However, the more thorough analyses actually show that there is no real evidence that the post-accession trajectories of these two countries have significantly differed from those of their post-communist counterparts who joined the EU in 2004 (Pop-Eleches and Levitz, 2010; Sedelmeier, 2014) 7

8 economic governance (European Commission, 2014; Grabbe, 2014), and to further tighten criteria for their successful completion. However, in addition to these conditions, which comprised a general set of additional accession conditions, the changed approach for the new candidates for EU membership after 2006 also included the identification of (additional) specific conditions for particular Western Balkan states that were almost exclusively related to the unsolved or contested statehood status of some of them. As will be shown below, this specific set of the Copenhagen 1993-plus-plus-plus conditions for the Western Balkan states (see Petrovic, Smith, 2013) constitutes an even bigger and more serious burden which these states have had to face on their way to EU accession. This is particularly true when looking at the progress in the EU accession process of the three least democratized countries in the region noted above (with the partial exception of Kosovo) and Serbia. Somewhat paradoxically, two decades after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement on Bosnia and Herzegovina (B-H) and 16 years after the Kumanovo Agreement and UN resolution 1244 on Kosovo, 15 these two democratically unstable countries continue to have a semi-protectorate status (initially and officially by the UN, nowadays effectively by the EU in coordination with the USA and NATO), while political life in Macedonia remains exposed to the less direct but strong supervision of the EU and USA. While the presence of various civilian and military missions (initially UN and currently EU) for a quarter century in Bosnia- Herzegovina and for 17 years in Kosovo have provided a significant amount of support in securing peace and building state institutions (particularly an independent judicial sector and professional police force see Tzifakis, 2012 and Noutcheva, 2012, ch. 4) in these two former federal units of former Yugoslavia, neither of them can yet be defined as a viable or functional state (see Bieber, 2011 as well as European Commission, various years and Freedom House, various years). Although the EU, which has gradually taken on the effective supervision of this country in place of the UN 16, had begun very early on to condition its assistance to Bosnia-Herzegovina with many political requirements regarding the building of more efficient government 15 The Kumanovo Agreement is a document signed between the International Security Force KFOR (initially NATO) and the governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i.e. Serbia and Montenegro) and of the Republic of Serbia which ended the NATO intervention (bombing) of Serbia and Montenegro and prohibited the presence of any Forces of the FRY and the Republic of Serbia in the territory of Kosovo (art. 4). The agreement (available at: was authorised by the UN Security Council s Resolution 1244 of 10 th June 1999 which de facto placed Kosovo under the UN protectorate. 16 The Office of the High Representative (OHR) for B-H was established by the UN Security Council [to] oversee implementation of civilian aspects of the Peace Agreement ending the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to ensure that Bosnia and Herzegovina evolves into a peaceful and viable democracy on course for integration in Euro-Atlantic institutions (OHR website), but all High Representatives were from EU countries and the EU is the main donor of the Office. Furthermore, the UN legislative and police mission in B-H (UNBIH) established after the adoption of the Dayton Peace agreement has been replaced by the European Union Police Mission (EUPM) from 1 January 2003 (ceased to exist by 2012) and the UN (de facto NATO) military mission Stabilization Force (SFOR) was replaced by presently still active (with some 600 military personnel) EU military mission EUFOR ALTHEA on 2 December 2004 (for more details see: 8

9 apparatus, many of these requirements never had a real chance to be adopted and/or perceived by the political leaderships of all three major B-H ethnic constituencies as legitimate (Noutcheva, 2012), let alone implemented. This is particularly related to EU demands for changes to the national legislature that would grant greater executive powers to the institutions of central government on the account of the governments of two entities that required (as stated in the Dayton Agreement and in the national constitution based on that agreement) a consensual majority of political representatives of all three major ethnic groups. Not only have such demands been continuously and strongly opposed by Bosnian Serb (and to a large extent by Bosnian Croat) politicians (see Noutcheva, 2012 and Tzifakis, 2012), they have also (as stated above) been continuously used by the political representatives of all three ethnic groups as an excuse for their not doing or incorrectly doing things which they objectively could have accomplished (Knaus and Cox, 2004). In this way, this conditioned assistance, which was offered under the formula of progress in association and integration with the EU for progress in the political centralization of the country, 17 was more of an additional hindrance than a form of constructive assistance that would help the state as a whole consolidate democratic institutions and cope with economic challenges and necessary reforms. Similarly as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the relatively large presence of the international (particularly EU) factor in Kosovo since 1999 has not yet resulted in transforming this former Serbian province into a functioning state, while the level of its democratization is by far the worst in the region. However, some progress in relations with Serbia achieved in the last couple of years within the so-called Belgrade-Pristina dialogue for the normalization of relations between the two parties, held under EU supervision (see European Union, 2016) gives at least a modest hope for Kosovo s better future. This hope can hardly be expected with current political developments in either Bosnia and Hercegovina or Macedonia, despite much better achieved levels of democratization (see Table 1) and current socio-economic development of the latter two. Although it is not so intensively exposed to EU monitoring and control as Bosnia- Herzegovina and Kosovo, Macedonia is another former Yugoslav republic with a contested statehood status. It continues to be hampered by the demands of its quite large Albanian ethnic minority (making up one quarter of the country s total population) for further territorial (i.e. ethnic) decentralization and the possible (con)federalization of governmental power as well as problematic relations with neighboring Greece and Bulgaria regarding the interpretation of the country s history and the use of its very name and language. Moreover, the relations with these two neighboring countries, who are also members of the EU, remain 17 Since the late 2000s the EU requirements have defined the necessity of the country s constitutional change in the above direction as the sine qua non for its progress in the SAP process and towards EU accession (See e.g. European Commission, Annual Progress Reports on Bosnia-Herzegovina for all years in the period available from the Commission s website as well as Bieber, 2010, Noutcheva 2012 and Tzifakis 2012). 9

10 the only official reason (or excuse) that has blocked any progress in this country s accession to the EU for more than ten years. 3. What is the problem with the EU s incentives and additional conditions for solving statehood disputes in the Western Balkans? While not hesitating to send its missions and experts to assist the troubled Western Balkan states in building state institutions, or, as was the case with Macedonia, to send its highest representatives to assist in (temporarily) resolving the political unrest that has resulted from the long-standing imbalances which Macedonia has been living with more or less from the time of the declaration of its independent statehood, 18 the EU has resisted providing an option of a quicker accession pathway that could have helped these states to clean their mess while progressing with the accession process (Grabbe et al, 2010). Instead of this, and in accordance with its tougher approach adopted in 2006, EU leaders have expected these troubled states to follow the EU s instructions (i.e. the additional Copenhagen-plus-plus-plus or SAP-plus-plus conditions see page 7) and solve their longstanding disputes alone. The problem is that these longstanding disputes have been primarily related to the very constitutional order of these states, which interested Western Balkan nations and ethnic groups have sharply divided opinions about. Therefore, the EU incentives for the (final) settlement could have been successful and accepted by the disputing Balkan parties only if they had been properly balanced, consistently used, as in other similar cases, and strictly based on universally adopted standards and norms (Noutcheva, 2009 and 2012). However, often this has not been the case. While, as noted above, the EU has consistently insisted on Bosnia and Herzegovina s centralization, it has actually supported decentralization in the other Western Balkan states with disputed statehood the former state union of Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia before the separation of Kosovo (see Massari, 2005 and Petrovic, 2013, Ch. 5). With regards to the EU incentive for the solution of the Greek- Macedonian dispute over Macedonia s official name, 19 it can simply be said that there was no 18 In addition to EU Commissioner Hahn s abovementioned mission in July 2015, there were several other occasions over the last fifteen to twenty years when EU envoys brokered peace deals between the disputing ethnic and political parties in Macedonia. The most important of these deals was definitely the one from 2001, when, after an open armed rebellion by the Albanian minority, internal ethnic peace was re-established by the Ohrid Agreement (which guaranteed a high level of collective and territorial political autonomy for the Albanian minority) and the very strong involvement of EU Commissioner and High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Javier Solana (see e.g. Brunbauer, 2002 and Vankovska 2007). 19 Due to its potential expansionistic connotation regarding the northern Greek province with the same name, Greece strongly opposes the use of the domestically preferred term Macedonia as this country s name. As a result, the country was admitted to the UN in 1992 under the provisional name (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), which is still in official use by the UN, international organisations and those states which accept Greek argument, and will remain so until the two parties find a mutually acceptable solution. It is solely for reasons of clarity, and without any attempt to interfere in the ongoing name debate that this country is referred to as Macedonia in this paper. 10

11 such incentive at all. Nevertheless, the EU did not hesitate in punishing the incompliance of the West Balkan parties with its (dis)incentives and de facto additional accession conditions by preventing the countries in question from advancing to the next step in the accession process. When, for instance, the European Council rejected the recommendation of the Commission (based on its positive assessment of the country s preparedness) to grant official candidate status to Serbia in December 2011, the reason for this was neither Serbia s failure to meet any of the (tightened) Copenhagen accession conditions regarding its political democratization and economic marketization nor the SAP conditions (which were de-facto the Copenhagen-plus conditions for the Western Balkan states) regarding cooperation on regional peace and stability defined in the late 1990s. Rather, the reason was Serbia s unsatisfactory progress in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue on issues which arose after the declaration of Kosovo s independence in 2008 and Serbia s rejection to recognize it (European Council, 2011, point 13). Similarly, when the European Council decided to grant Serbia official candidate status three months later (see Table 2), the only reason for the change of the Council s previous opinion was a positive report received in the meantime from the EU Council which stated that Serbia has continued to show credible commitment and Table 2. Progress in EU Accession Country SA/Europe Agreement Application Official Accession Negotiations Signed Entered for EU Candidate opened closed into force Membership Status Albania 12/06/2006 1/04/ /04/ /06/2014 NO NO Bosnia- 16/06/2008 1/06/ /02/2016 NO NO NO Herzeg. Macedonia FYR 9/04/2001 1/04/ /03/ /12/2005 NO NO Montenegro 15/10/2007 1/05/ /12/ /12/ /06/2012 NO Serbia 29/04/2008* 1/09/ /12/2009 1/03/ /01/2014** NO Kosovo 27/10/2015 1/04/2016 NO NO NO NO Croatia 9/04/2001 1/02/ /02/ /06/2004 5/10/ /06/2012 Bulgaria 9/ 03/1993 1/02/ /12/ /12/ /2/ Romania 1/02/1993 1/02/ /06/ /12/ /2/ * frozen pending further Serbian cooperation with the ICTY from 29/04/2008 to 7/12/2009 ** provisionally/officially opened; the first chapters (35 and 32) were opened only on 14 December 2015 Source: European Commission, various documents. achieved further progress in moving forward with the implementation in good faith of agreements reached in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue (EU General Affairs Council, 2012: 1). Hence, the above elaborated slow progress of Serbia in opening accession negotiations once it got the status of an official candidate for EU membership in March 2012, and even after the negotiations were officially launched in January 2014, has not been determined by Serbia s (weak) progress in post-communist reform (which by the early 2010s had definitely 11

12 reached or even slightly overcome the level of Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia at the time they opened their accession negotiations in 2000 or 2005 respectively see Table 1 and Petrovic, Smith, 2013 for more details), but was exclusively a result of its progress in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue (see also Poznatov, 2015). The main reason for the slow progress of Macedonia in the EU accession process is even more external than Serbia s and is bizarre and almost tragi-comic (Vachudova, 2014), particularly after the Commission had recommended to the Council to open accession negotiations with Macedonia already in 2009 (European Commission, 2009). This reason has nothing to do with either Macedonia s ability to meet the original or tightened Copenhagen accession conditions or the later defined SAP conditions. The main and, in fact, the only official reason Macedonia has now been waiting for more than a decade to open accession negotiations after it was recognized as an official candidate for EU membership in December 2005 (which is an absolute record in the history of all EU/EC/EEC enlargements since the foundation of the European Economic Community [EEC] in 1957) is much more trivial and has been entirely determined by the Greek veto in the Council imposed due to concerns regarding Macedonia s official name. Taking into account the deepness of the economic and financial crises which Greece has now been in for years, and its dependence on international aid and assistance, it is hard to believe that serious engagement by the EU and its leading member states (possibly with the USA) in persuading these two parties to find a compromise could not have solved this problem many years ago and opened a pathway for Macedonia s much quicker EU accession. However, the EU s inaction in this regard and its waiting for the Macedonian political leadership to find a way to meet this specific accession condition more or less alone, by reaching a compromise solution with Greece, 20 as well as the continuous postponement of the opening accession negotiations, have started to have serious negative repercussions on the socio-political stability of Macedonia. Years spent in limbo neither here nor there regarding the country s EU accession bid have not only encouraged Bulgaria to join Greece in opposing the Commission recommendation for opening accession negotiations with Macedonia since and negatively impacted the general enthusiasm in the country regarding its possible integration into the EU (and also NATO, as this attempt has also been vetoed by Greece). They have also contributed to the backsliding of some of the previous achieved reforms. As is partially visible through the worsening of the country s democracy score (Table 1) it was also recognized in the latest Commission report on Macedonia (European Commission, 2015a), that the last decade s reforms are being undermined by real and potential political interference in the work of the judiciary (p.12). However, although the Commission is aware of such damaging effects of the continuous postponement of the opening of accession negotiations with Macedonia, it obviously cannot do much about it by itself. Hence, while it states in this report that [t]he name issue with Greece needs to be resolved as a matter of urgency (ibid, p. 5), several pages later in the 20 Macedonia and Greece had agreed already in 1995, when they formalized bilateral relations to negotiate this problem under the auspices of the United Nations; however, these negotiations are very occasional and informal and are without any resolute political incentive which could have moved them forward. 21 Because of stealing from Bulgaria s history and badmouthing [it] (EurActiv.com, 2012). 12

13 same document it also states that there have not been any formal talks held on the name issue between the two parties in the last year (ibid, p. 24). While Kosovo s progress in its relations with the EU could be assessed as satisfactory (although it has only very recently completed the first step on its long road to the EU membership by signing the SAA see Table 2) taking into account its late start and very weak level of democratization (and even more so the fact that its statehood status is still contested by five EU member states), according to the European Commission, the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina is at a standstill (European Commission, 2015). As shown in Table 2, after this country had signed its SAA with the EU in 2008, the EU member states needed seven years to ratify it (which is another negative record in the history of all EU/EC/EEC enlargements held by one Western Balkan country). Moreover, until very recently the EU leaders effectively did not allow the B-H government to submit an official application for membership (subjecting it to the prior successful accomplishment of certain conditions related to the country s centralization) despite an existing consensus on this among the political leaders of all three core ethnic groups in the country. While the official explanation of the Commission for such slow progress in EU accession of Bosnia and Herzegovina is that this country remains at a standstill in the European integration process [due to] a lack of collective political will on the part of the political leaders to address the reforms necessary for progress on the EU path (European Commission, 2014, p. 24), the reasons for this standstill can also be found in the very content of these reforms. As discussed above, most of these necessary reforms are related to the proposed or demanded changes by the European Commission to the national legislature, including the constitution that should grant greater executive powers to the central/federal government in order to overcome a complex institutional architecture [established by the Dayton Peace Treaty and the country s constitution] that remains inefficient and which is subject to different interpretations (European Commission, 2015, p. 7). However, the basic problem is that the political elites of the Bosnian Serbs, and to a large extent of the Bosnian Croats, who are supported by a significant majority of their respective populations, consider this complex and inefficient institutional architecture as the basic guarantor of their wellbeing and even survival as an ethnicity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they are not ready to voluntarily accept any (substantial) rebuilding of this architecture (i.e. the centralization of the country s legislature) at any price, even if that price is the country s very accession to the EU (Tzifakis, 2012, pp ; Inserbia.info, 2015; Balkaninside, 2015). Nevertheless, the EC and EU leaders have continued to insist on the necessity of these types of reforms to Bosnia and Herzegovina s legal and political institutions and repeatedly copy such demands in its documents, instead of trying to find some compromise formula which would enable the country to go ahead with the existing constitution and legislative order (possibly with some minor changes that could have been consensually agreed), 22 as 22 As stated earlier, all the Commission s annual progress reports on B-H in recent years have insisted on the changes to (i.e. centralisation of) the constitution, particularly after the so-called Sejdić-Finci ruling of the 13

14 suggested by some scholars years ago (Grabbe et al, 2010; Petrovic 2009). While the official excuses for such a continuing status-quo or standstill in Bosnia-Herzegovina s (non)progress in EU accession, similarly as in the above discussed naming issue of Macedonia, are that compromise formulas either do not exist or are extremely difficult to be found, the above discussed positive steps in Serbia s and Kosovo s accession process convincingly confirm that compromises can be reached even in areas where they initially seem to be genuinely impossible. Finding a formula which will encourage the Serbian and Kosovan governments to take part together in the Brussels talks, 23 and even more so find a way to open the process of Kosovo s accession to the EU despite the fact that five EU member states still do not recognize its statehood, seems to be a much greater challenge than finding acceptable compromises which would overcome current obstacles to Bosnia and Herzegovina s and Macedonia s accession to the EU. The slightly changed focus of EU actions towards Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the EU demands made of that country since 2014 towards addressing instead the outstanding socio-economic challenges it faces (European Commission 2015, p. 4; see also EU Foreign Affairs Council, 2014) that firstly led to the entering into force of Bosnia and Herzegovina s SAA with the EU on 1 June 2015 and then allowed EU leaders to finally officially allow Bosnia and Herzegovina to submit its application for EU membership on 15 February 2016, is definitely a step (although a very late one) forward. Only time will tell whether this will be followed by other similar EU actions that may help drag Bosnia and Herzegovina, together with its Western Balkan neighbours, out of the stalled accession in which it has stayed for some years. Conclusion The current state of play of progress in the accession process of the candidates for EU membership from the Western Balkans is a result of the different capacities of individual Western Balkan states to meet the EU accession conditions, but even more so a result of the changed EU approach towards further enlargement after the emergence of enlargement fatigue in the mid-2000s. This changed approach has not only included the establishment of a general set of additional accession conditions for the new candidates for EU membership but also the identification of some specific (additional) conditions for some of the candidates. While their post-communist counterparts which joined the EU within the 2004/2007 European Court of Human Rights on the (non-)electability of representatives of national minorities to the Bosnian and Herzegovinian collective presidency. While there seems to exist consensus among the representatives of all three major ethnic groups about the necessity of amending the constitution in this respect (see European Commission, 2015, p.21), the demanded changes are more problematic for the Bosnian politicians in the area of the current (mainly consensual) decision-making process in the federal parliament and the jurisdiction of the federal institutions over the regional levels of government, particularly over the Serbian entity and the so-called Croatian Cantons in the Bosniak-Croat entity. 23 While the Serbian officials explain their participation in the Brussels talks as participation in talks with the government of the autonomous province of Kosovo (hence the name Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue instead of Serbia-Kosovo Dialogue ), Kosovo s officials have defined the same talks as intergovernmental and as Serbia s de facto acknowledgment of Kosovo s independence 14

15 enlargement round had to meet a relatively clearly defined set of accession conditions (defined in June 1993) that did not change by the time they opened (and concluded) their accession negotiations, the EU candidates from the Western Balkans have had to cope with a tougher set of continuously increasing requirements from the very beginning of their EU aspirations. While in this regard the SAP conditions related to the post-war reconciliation and peace-building in the region were just and necessarily imposed (as the Copenhagen-plus criteria) on these states due to developments during the 1990s, the same can hardly be said for the conditions that the EU imposed on these states after it began feeling enlargement fatigue in the mid-2000s. The problem was not so much in the additional conditions which were set equally for all the new candidates (the Copenhagen-plus-plus conditions for the Western Balkan states) after the European Council s decision to renew [the] consensus on enlargement in 2006, but rather in specific conditions which were additionally imposed on the individual Western Balkan states (the Copenhagen-plus-plus-plus conditions), primarily with regard to protracted disputes about their own or their neighbours statehood status. While Montenegro and Albania (and earlier Croatia) were spared EU requirements to comply with these specific conditions related to statehood status, progress in the accession process of the other four candidates or potential candidates for EU membership from the Western Balkans in recent years has been almost exclusively determined by the EU s assessments of their compliance with these (additional) specific conditions. This is particularly true when considering the progress in EU accessions of Serbia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their additional problems with these extra post-2006 conditions were not only related to the additional costs of compliance (Schimmelfenig, 2008) i.e. the fact that they needed to (additionally) deal with these additional conditions as such. A greater factor which has made this additional engagement largely fruitless was that, as shown above, these specific conditions (or EU incentives) were often inappropriately formulated, with very little respect for a country s specifics and realistic chances to meet them, i.e. having them accepted by all disputing parties. In this way, and in sharp contrast to the experience of the countries of the 2004/2007 EU enlargement, the Western Balkan candidates and potential candidates for EU membership since 2006 (with the partial exception of Croatia, Albania and Montenegro) have been largely denied the most important form of EU assistance for postcommunist reform the possibility to link their political and economic reforms to the EU accession negotiation process. This has ultimately led to the slower and unnecessary longer consolidation of democratic institutions in these countries, and in the most drastic cases of Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, it has actually resulted in the backsliding of some of the previously achieved reforms. 15