The Western Balkans : From History to Europe

London School of Economics
6 March 2006

Bismarck’s famous statement about the Balkans and the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier were always fatuous. The 20th century is littered with the bones of Europeans because of wars and conflicts that have started in the Balkans and spread further afield.

Today the Western Balkans are a source of permanent instability in Europe. It is not just the continuing non-peace in some parts of the region but the new threats of international crime, drug trafficking, people smuggling, child prostitution, illegal immigration and economic migration.
 Europe has a challenge. It is to Europeanise the Balkans or face the Balkanisation of Europe. I spent four years as a minister dealing with this region and although by nature an optimist I fear that there is little good news to report.
 What are the problems?
 It is in the Western Balkans that we see five “Cs” of contemporary history at their most acute.
 What are these five “Cs”. They are 1) Confession; 2) Capitalism; 3) Corruption; 4) Crime; and 5) Communism
 There is two much of the first. The Western Balkans are where two of the three great monotheisms confront each other. Moreover the sub-division between the Roman and the orthodox churches are a powerful element in the politics of the region.
 I recall after the riots of March 2004 inviting the late president Rugova to visit the orthodox church in the heart of Pristina which had been burnt out by the thuggish violence of Kosovan Albanians.
 He did so willingly and condemned in front of the national and international media the destruction wrought to the church.
 The next day I was in Belgrade where I met the Grand Mufti at the principal mosque which had been attacked by Serb militants. The books of the library had been pulled of their shelves and set on fire in a terrifying reminder of the last time European extremists had burnt books.
 Both the Albanian attacks on the holy places of the Serb church and the Serb assault on the historic mosque were unacceptable reminders of the religious passions that run through European history.
 With our experience in Northern Ireland of religiously fuelled or implicitly validated conflict, terrorism and murder Britain can not be too superior.
 The religious dimension also has to take in the strongly Catholic identity of Croatia and the creation of a new little Hapsburg Empire based on the strongly catholic nations of Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Austria and Croatia.
 Neither the Vatican nor the leadership of the Serb Orthodox churches have shown sufficient leadership in calling for confessional politics to be subordinate to democratic and secular politics.
 After the church, mammon. The absence of modern capitalism from the western Balkans lies at the heart of many of its problems and frustrations.
 Yugoslavia, which was the richest non-capitalist European state barely two decades ago has sundered into eight states, with only one of the them, Slovenia, able to share ranking with European states further to the north.
 Money may have no smell but it is a very timorous, fearful commodity. It flees instability, violence, criminality, absence of rule of law and all the other attributes of the region.
 The continuing confusion between political power and office and private business and money-making, what one might call the Oligarch syndrome from the former Soviet Union, continues to make the Western Balkans unattractive for investors.
 Western companies that do invest there report difficulties in doing normal, legal, corruption and influence-free business.
 The non-status of Kosovo and the anomalous position of Montenegro with a different currency and even internal tariff barriers in relation to Serbia make the development of a normal market economy even more difficult.
 Rule of law and a fully functioning state authority is more, not less, vital in today’s modern market economies.
 Albania, for example, should be moving ahead swiftly to develop a functioning tourist economy as prices in Croatia rapidly reach the same level as other developed Mediterranean, Aegean and Adriatic resorts.
 But instead too many sectors of the region are seen as plagued by the third C, namely corruption which is intimately linked with the fourth C, crime.
 As one senior official at the Foreign Office put it to me, Albania is in danger as being known as a one-issue country – namely home to more criminality than any other in Europe.
 I once suggested to an Albanian Foreign minister that some condign punishment was needed after British papers showed photographs of how easy it was to get perfect fake UK passports in Tirana, with money being exchanged openly under the eyes of the policeman in Skanderberg Square.
 I said some example should be made of these criminals and perhaps they should be taken out and strung up. Alas, never try irony and metaphor in diplomatic discussions.
 My friend, the minister returned to Tirana, and asked the British ambassador there why I was urging a return to capital punishment in Albania!
 As an international player there is much  to commend Albania. It works constructively in the United Nations, denounces terrorism, contributes troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the  fight against global terrorism, and under all its governments has been moderate and measured on the Kosovo question – rejecting all notions of a Greater Albania, for example.
 Britain of course has strong connections with Albania through Edith Durham, a woman whose life story surely deserves a new popular biography and a film. The British commedia, Sir Norman Wisdom, who certainly made me laugh as a boy is revered in Albania and there are some important investments in the rich archaeological history of the region. After all some of the defining battles of European civilisation, especially those that transition from republic to empire of ancient Rome took place in what is today’s Albania.
 The nation as prosperous Greece to its south and even more prosperous Italy across the sea. It is strange therefore that the Albanian authorities seem so powerless in tackling organised crime.
 The new international economy we call globalisation has brought with it, new international crime based mainly on the movement of people, drugs, money, girls into prostitution and the materiel for global terrorism.
 Too much of this traffic flows through the Balkans which is the passoir between northern and western Europe and the Middle East, and the Muslim states between Turkey and India from which so many people are willing to spend all their savings to flee.
 I know the efforts of British government agencies, as well as other European agencies to help develop police, intelligence and judicial agencies in the region. I have seen many of these valiant efforts with my own eyes.
 But they do not seem to work.
 Policing and judicial work is by tradition the reserved role of the state. Any suggestion of joint European work in this field produces howls of protest from the Euro-hostile sovereignists.
 Yet as we look at the damage done to British society by criminality originating in the Balkans and the immense damage done to the ambitions of all decent Albanians, Serbs, Macedonians and so forth to promote a Euro-Atlantic future for their countries I wonder if the time has come to ask Europe to take over a greater responsibility for the policing and law enforcement in the region.
 When I visited Kosovo as Minister I admired the work of the UK police officers who were sent to help train and work with Kosovan colleagues – both Albanian and Serb. But I formed the impression that it was hard to get convictions as judges and magistrates were often under threats or menaces to themselves or their families if  they enforced the law.
 Yet the law of Lek, or the law of communist influence, has to be replaced and urgently be the law and standards of Europe. Europe and the United States spend a great deal of money keeping troops in the region, with infrastructure that more and more resembles a standing army of permanent presence, much as one saw in Germany after 1950.
 But the demand today is for fewer soldiers and more police, fewer generals and more judges. It is time for Europe to put on its thinking cap and work out how to increase the level of rule of law and respect for law in the region and Albania would be a good place to start.
 At least Albania has an established state, within settled borders.
 This is not the case in too much of the rest of the Western Balkans.
 It really is time that someone told the truth about Kosovo. The people of Kosovo forged their nation under the wise and Ghandi-like leadership of the late President Rugova.
 I remember the late Peter Glotz then the general secretary of the German Social Democratic Party addressing an international trade union conference in Montreal, Quebec in 1988 and he denounced the Milosevic speech made at Kosovo Pole. Glotz told his audience that for the first time since 1945, he feared Europe would be engulfed by a new fascism, with ultra-nationalistic rhetoric merged with terror against what was seen as a subordinate race or ethnicity.
 Most of the listeners to his remarks had no idea what he was talking about. Milos – who? Koso –where?  We came to learn the geography of the region, its history, its personalities, but far too late.
 I think Glotz was right to emphasise the national socialistic outlines of the Milosevic era with its fusion of communism and fascism, and the morphing of state, national and religious identity and authority.
 A similar process took place in Croatia. Robin Cook, when Foreign Secretary, used to urge people to visit Tudjman because he said it was the last chance to see the ghost of Mussolini with the cult of personality and the crushing of all independent opposition.
 I know this comparison is hurtful to many Croatian friends but for four long years I urged Croatian leaders of different parties to cooperate with the EU and International Tribunal in the Hague and get the wanted war criminal, Ante Gotovina, to stand trial for the alleged war crimes he committed.
 I found myself like Alice in Wonderland, listening to deeply intelligent people, telling that they had no idea where Gotovina was even though he was being paid by the state and was able to give press conferences.
 Now thank goodness he is in the Hague and that sad story is over. But what a waste for years and years. I believe Croatia has as much a right to be a candidate country for EU membership as Romania and Bulgaria but the failure of the political class in Zagreb to tackle the Gotovina question has lost Croatia a decade of full European integration.
 The failure of the Serb leadership to deal with Mladic and Karadzic problem is even more egregious. The worst mass murder in cold blood in Europe since the Nazi era was committed at Srebrenica. There can be no entry for Serbia into the full community of European nations until this problem if solved.
 And the tragedy is that I consider Belgrade, Novi Sad and the other great Serb cities to be the natural centres of a new Serbian culture and economic renewal.
 To spend 10 minutes in Belgrade is to feel a great European city just waiting to come back to live if only it can shake off the crimes of the Milosevic era.
 Serbs are brilliant economists, writers, artists, doctors, intellectuals and no people are more equipped to make the post-industrial economy come to life.
 Serbs are cursed by recent history. They lost control of Yugoslavia, they lost control of Kosovo, they lost their visa-free travel rights, they lost their wealth,  the VJ, one of the most professional armies in the world has no allies as neither Nato nor the EU can use its talents until the Mladic and Karadzic problem is solved. Poor Serbia. A great people, great cities but without a place in Europe their nation needs and deserves..
 But these are temporary set-backs, Soon I believe Serbia will treat the past as history and start to live for a European future.
 And one of the keys to opening the door to that future is Kosovo. It is time for Belgrade to say “Let Kosovo be Kosovo.” As Micheline Calmey-Rey, the Swiss Foreign Secretary has boldly said, it is time to recognise that Kosovo must soon have its independence as a sovereign state. Poor, small, under-resourced, too full of crime and recrimination but until Kosova gets state-hood it cannot take the autonomous decisions needed to move forward.
 Madame Calmey Rey is saying out loud and on the record what every foreign minister in Europe and in the United States says in private. We have wasted too much time with the pretence that Serbia somehow would retain some control over Kosovo just as English politicians fondly believed they could exercise some control over Ireland once the Irish had fought and won their war of independence 85 years ago.
 An independent Kosovo will be an ally for Serbia, releasing Belgrade from the chains of history and allowing a radiant future for Serb energies and efficiencies.
 The sooner UNMIK is closed down the better. Kosovo cannot be managed from New York. The European Union will require a new level of engagement with the region. As soon as possible visa free travel must be instituted. Good economics will drive out bad economics aka criminality.
 A key player must be Greece which at the moment has no common border with an EU member state. I hope that Greek engagement and investment in Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo will encourage the swiftest possible movement towards EU integration.
 All this can be helped if the political class in the region acts to stamp out crime and corruption.

 
After the disgraceful failures of the Conservative policy of non-intervention in the Western Balkans after 1990, the Labour government has reversed this with a full-hearted engagement. Tony Blair has championed the case of EU enlargement to the countries of the Western Balkans and it remains remains the right policy. Right because the EU would be incomplete without a region that is historically and culturally part of Europe, and surrounded by the EU geographically. And it is right because the perspective of joining the EU, along with the perspective of joining NATO, underpins British and European efforts to bring lasting stability to the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

Our second starting point is that the process of enlargement to the Western Balkans should essentially follow that used for the A10. That is to say, a step by step process of aligning these countries with the disciplines required for EU membership. The drive for this must come from the countries themselves. Britain can give them support – financial and intellectual – but it is essentially up to them to drive, by demonstrating that they meet the conditions of the acquis and the Copenhagen criteria.

Conditionality is right for three reasons. First, applicants must be ready to deal with the disciplines of the EU as members. Secondly we must convince ourselves, and our publics, that they will be able to do so. Thirdly – most importantly – the process of meeting these conditions provides a formidable lever for reform and modernisation. The journey is, in some ways, as important as the destination. 2005 showed us that a conditionality based approach works.

But this list points us to our third starting point. Western Balknas enlargement will be different. There are common elements with the A10 enlargement, notably the need to overcome the legacy of communist economic mismanagement. We should not overlook how serious this is. If Yugoslavia was the most prosperous country in the Eastern bloc in the late 1980s, today it lags far behind. But we face additional challenges:

• the legacy of war: deep inter-ethnic tensions and distrust, a continued failure among some groups to come to terms with their responsibilities for what happened, or to address reconciliation

• the legacy of centuries of poor governance in the region, which has given us weak states and a weak tradition of democracy. It is sometimes easy to forget how many countries in the region are trying out not just democracy, but self-governance, for the first time in modern history
 
This does not mean that applying the A10 model to the Balkans will not work. Nor should we exaggerate the scale of the task – no country in the region has a population larger than that of greater London. But it is likely to be a longer and sometimes harder process. It also means that we have to be ready to fine tune our model to fit the current task. Let me pick out six issues that flow from this analysis.   
 
First, I don't believe that we should fix a timetable for WB enlargement. It is important that that the pace of progress for each country should be determined by the speed at which it meets the required conditions. I hope it happens quickly but it will be for Zagreb and Belgrade, Pristina and Skopje, Tirana and Sarajevo to decide if they will tackle the well-known problems.

2006 will be about implementing commitments and delivering on reform. I hope hope, like the Commission, (and in Ollie Rehn, the Western Balkans have a serious friend and the best enlargement Commissioner Europe has ever had) that BiH, SAM and Albania will be able to conclude SAA negotiations by the end of the year, and that Macedonia will have delivered on the reform goals set by the December European Council. But this depends on the countries themselves.

Secondly, I believe that the best way to ensure that WB enlargement works is to maintain clear conditionality. We should not seek to raise the bar, but we should be clear that no-one will be allowed to sneak under it. This matters not just because we want to protect our own interests, but because it is the way to lever reform.

Thirdly, we need to be prepared to go the extra mile from time to time and use the enlargement process to re-enforce a process of reform that goes beyond what is required by the acquis, or was demanded of previous candidates. We must be prepared to recognise a specifically Balkan context. Implementation of the Ohrid agreement in Macedonia was one example. Police reform in Bosnia another.

We also need to sometimes go the extra mile in terms of how we help these countries navigate the stabilisation and association process, and beyond. Of course it is right that they must take ownership of their own movement through the process. The closer they get to accession, the greater this ownership must be. But it is also clear that for different reasons countries in the region still sometimes need our direct and often quite political intervention before they do what is needed. This may be discrete, but it is necessary. This is why the role of special representatives in the region, and of direct political engagement from member states, remains so critical.

I welcome the involvement of the EU Foreign Minister-designate, Javier Solana, in the region. If a crisis blows up then quickly the top men at the FCO, or the Quai or the AA rush down there or make statements. But it is persistent political engagement at a non-crisis level that is needed  Therefore it would be helpful if the Council of Ministers could designate a troika of political ministers,  not functionaries or diplomats, who could travel to the region and speak with real weight and authority.

Fourthly, we must keep in mind that while the pre-accession process is the most important lever for reform in the region, there are others, and we need to work to ensure that these different agendas are mutually re-enforcing. In particular, and as we have discussed in detail this morning, we need the economic reform agenda in the region to be strengthened, which in part means that the messages on economic reform that the region receives from the EU are consistent with those that it receives from the World Bank and IMF. The three main institutions need to work closely together, with the support of the member states. A common script for us all to follow would immensely useful.

Fifthly, we should tackle the hearts and minds agenda. It is not a given that support for membership of the EU will remain high in the region; tough reforms, economic restructuring, and a long wait, could all undermine this aspiration, so helping to feed a return to destructive nationalism. It is good that the Commission and Presidency have put this at heart of Salzburg agenda.

Lastly, a word of warning. Settling the status of Kosovo will be the biggest issue for the international community in 2006. The future of Montenegro, the pace of reform in Bosnia – these are also key questions. But Kosovo is the last big status question to settle. It is not just Kosovo’s future that is at stake, but in many ways that of Serbia as well.

A think tanker, or journalist, would now tell you that if the EU has any sense of its strategic interests, it would be getting ready to make sure that if Serbia faces up to the difficult choices it faces on Kosovo, and works constructively towards a settlement that is acceptable to the people of Kosovo, then the EU should be ready to make a reality of Serbia’s European perspective. We should be ready to be generous not just on the enlargement track, but on wider issues such as visa facilitation, debt, NATO enlargement and so on. The prize of a Serbia that feels that it can move on from its past and embrace a new future in Europe, would be immense. The knock on benefits for Bosnia, Macedonia, indeed the whole region, could after all, be hugely significant.