Serbia, the EU, NATO and the hope of a bulk accession into the union of the western balkans

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE “LJUBLJANA AGENDA FOR THE NEW PHASE OF STABILIZATION AND ASSOCIATION PROCESS" Belgrade, 30 / 31st May 2008 1st Panel Discussion: EU Reform Treaty: Is EU ready for the new round of Enlargement? ARMANDO MARQUES GUEDES VICE - PRESIDENT OF THE PORTUGUESE EUROPEAN MOVEMENT PROFESSOR, LAW FACULTY, UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA Serbia, the EU, NATO and the Hope of a Bulk Accession into the Union of the Western Balkans Reflections around the Ljubljana Agenda for the New Phase in the Stabilization and Association Process So as to circumscribe quickly and neatly my topic, let me start by pointing out what I will not be talking about in this communication I will not be talking about nitty-gritty issues, like the manifold senses in which the Lisbon Treaty facilitates Serbia’s entrance into the EU – while it also creates conditionalities for that very entrance, and therefore in some senses it actually increases demands on the Western Balkans, namely Serbia, as pertains to an eventual accession into the EU Although I shall in passing fleetingly breeze through much, if not all, of this, I will not make it in any way a focus of my intervention here I will not, either, look into the details of the road-map somehow designed by the Ljubljana Agenda for this new phase of the Stabilization and Association process, the step that precedes actual accession – or at least one which is previous to a final decision on the timings of that accession So what will I say? Most of the things I will try to touch upon are actually rather trivial or banal ones, at least if taken one-by-one But as I try to engage that, what I shall is try to draw a map, a series of political maps of sorts I will put on the hat of a boring academic, rather than a political one, and much less a hat worn by a clerc: what I shall try to do, in other words, is to draw a bigger picture, as it were I will attempt to put matters into context In order not to be misunderstood, I would like to be clear at the very outset about my perspective, about my bias, if you will: my starting point, and my baseline, shall be, throughout, the EU's angle on this This is, in actual fact, the job I was effectively allotted Basically, I shall try to sort of answer an implicit question – are we witnessing a significant step forward in this accession process, or are we instead merely just a minimum consensus as pertains this issue? This is the core issue I shall try to unfold To so, I want to focus on three main themes, all of which pertain rather directly to the Lisbon Treaty and the Ljubljana Agenda, and in particular, in what relates to their implications for EU enlargement into the Western Balkans [hereafter, WB] To so, I shall focus on three main topics The three topics I will touch upon very briefly and superficially, are: • one, the variable geometry of WB accessions – bulk accessions, ma non troppo, I would point out, as clearly they are not really bulk accessions; I shall go into this variable geometry • The second point I will be looking at are the different structural positions and interests of WB States, or rather States and public opinions: empowered civil societies, NGOs, think-tanks, etc in this rather complex process • My third and last point involves looking at WBs accession into the EU in terms of its wider context, and I'm thinking of the term “wider” not as a mere unitary extension, but as a series of dimensions I will try to describe at least four such contextual dimensions Let me just enumerate them briefly, as I shall, if I have the time, try to go into them further down the road As concerns my initial point, note that there is, first, the matter of other simultaneous – or at least partly overlapping – potential accessions, namely those of the Ukraine and Georgia, in both cases non-WB accessions That clearly constitutes a pertinent context that places strong constraints, let me call them this (and both positive and negative ones, at that) on the WB accession wave The recent “yes, but not right away” response of NATO to these two countries is (or so I will argue) of import here A second context: the frontiers of Europe, as they were called, the issue of whether Europe has “natural frontiers”, and the softer one of whether it should stop growing or not? The real world borders – allow me to call them that – of Europe, is another context which again I will go into because it is in tension with “the political frontiers of Europe” notion it conveys, the harder version of which is the old “Fortress Europe” idea unfortunately still held in some European member-States If Europe has not yet somehow reached its natural limits, at least these are now in plain sight, or so I will claim It cannot, really, easily expand east after the Ukraine and Georgia Who believes, seriously, that Russia will soon come into Europe? And after it expands the WB, it cannot really expand south either Who really trusts, too, that the Maghreb countries will come into Europe? These “natural political borders”, in my humble opinion, leave just a leeway for future expansion, into Central Asia via Turkey, of course Third, and this forms yet another contextual layer, we have the challenge an increasingly resurgent Russia poses to Europeans, and that does not only involve matters which were brought up because of the Ukraine and Georgia; they of course were instrumentally used in Serbia in relation to conditionalities imposed by both the EU and NATO For the EU and its expansion, Russia’s rise from the ashes and its growing regional and global influence surely raises many other issues as well A fourth context, and one which I think is essential – and I will try to dig further into this, maybe in questions and answers, as this is sort of my pièce de résistance – is perhaps less obvious It is the following: I strongly believe we must think of the ongoing EU enlargements in the context of NATO enlargements They echo, so to speak Allow me a metaphor NATO and the EU are twin birds that fly together They are synchronized, time-wise Moreover, they entail, in a rather marked sense, almost identical consolidation mechanics (let me call them that) and accession procedures Just note, cursorily, the interesting overlaps The EU Stability and Association Agreements, pacts and processes, are very similar to NATO Membership Action Plans, the famous MAPs NATO’s Partnership for Peace, started in the last decade, has a twin sibling in the European Neighbourhood Policy and the Union’s “Ring of Friends”, as it has been called, a largely Kantian ideal which took off not much later Conditionalities for accession into Europe, an apparent EU exclusive (conditionalities were absent in NATO for many years), have since 1995 somehow been reproduced by the Clinton Administration in William Perry’s famous five conditionalities for entry into the Transatlantic Alliance At a more macro level parallels are just as striking Synchronised accession is a de facto move in the big bang of growth of both NATO and the EU, and it has been so for the last few years: the EU and NATO expand in tandem But this has not happened randomly Note that in virtually every case, in the last half-dozen years or more, NATO was first and then the EU, candidate States entered the Alliance before they entered the Union Is this going to change? Are we going to see, say with Serbia, a synchronized movement of inclusion that puts accession into the EU first and NATO only later? Perhaps Whatever the answer to this (and it is a tough question, I think) I shall insist that this synchronized dance, as I called it, is an important context we must take into account Well, then, so what of all this? All these contexts are dimensions which are essential for us to understand the EU's response to WB accession So let me break this up, very briefly, very maplike – mapping issues as it were First, the so loudly trumpeted WB bulk accession – bulk ma no troppo as I qualified it My point here is simple: shouldn't we rather think of it as a series of gradients from easy to less easy accessions? Let me be very clear here, by giving a handful of examples Surely, if looked at from a juridical or political point of view, Croatia's accession into the EU is rather easy, if compared to that of other states in the WB, say Albania, or the Kosovo We can go further along this gradient: note, for example, that the special case of Macedonia is special indeed By analogy with what happened to NATO, one could expect one of the memberStates of the EU, Greece, to continue for as long as it can to stipulate the demand for fulfillment of a special condition of its own – a change in name – for accession; so Macedonia’s entrance, on the face of it, is not as easy as those of Croatia or Albania, but surely Macedonia’s accession into the Union is still easy if compared to the next ones down the steep slope – Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina; at least politically it appears to be relatively easy, when compared with these two The tough cookie here is, of course, Serbia My point, briefly, is that rather than ask ourselves the linear question of whether – and how – a bulk accession will happen, we should better note that there is a gradient of difficulties of sorts (thus one of plausibility, as well) as far as applications of legal and political conditionalities is concerned What about the real world now, you may well ask, which is a completely different thing from these idealised legal and political constructs? Well, in the real world I would say everything is pretty much the same In the real world Serbia's situation is quite different from that of it’s WB neighbours Serbia was explicitly placed on a fast track for accession, and Serbia will remain there and progress along that track faster than the others for as long as it fulfills a series of conditionalities that were demanded in return Can Serbia fulfill the minimal conditionalities imposed on this fast-track accession or not? This is the real issue The position of Serbia on the gradient we can draw by combining our ideal and reality – whether it is indeed the toughest cookie or not – depends on how much it does of what the Union required of it Now let me move onto the second point I wanted to stress – the different positions and interests of WB States, States, public opinions and the plethora of other entities I mentioned Again let me, by analogy, use here too my gradient image, a sort of informal ranking that runs from easy to difficult There is a rather close fit between State and public opinion in Croatia, and also probably Montenegro and certainly Albania, as far as accession to the EU is concerned This fit surely does not exist quite as clearly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it certainly does not – though the signs are very good, thank God – in Serbia So again we have an empirical gradient, this time a civil society bottom-up one, in what concerns ease of accession – and therefore, if different rates and effective pressures not come into play, we could expect, again, the upcoming accessions to be bulk ones, ma no troppo What does this mean for Serbia? It means that notwithstanding the importance of the Regional Co-operation Council in Sarajevo, what it will with NGOs etc., all is still by and large undefined: are we going to see compliance and convergence with the EU standards that the weak conditionalities now imposed give body to? Or, at least, will we see progress? And, if we do, will it be enough to convince Europe of the benefits of keeping Serbia on the special fast track which we designed for it in the special Counsel that followed the last Serb elections? This is the real issue and we should focus on that; solutions will become clearer if we In the small amount of time I have left, I now want to move on to the last bit, before going into the conclusions – I want to briefly focus on the wider context for European enlargement into the WB Let me first talk about the Ukraine and Georgia As we all well know, the Ukraine and Georgia are in much more dire straits as far accessions into both the EU and NATO are concerned then the ones the WB States find themselves in The reason for this is very simple to understand – unlike what is the case for the Balkans, many EU member-States, including major great powers like France and Germany, are very hesitant about challenging Russia They have actually brought this up and they have stated this to the US quite directly, explicitly, publicly, in a meeting in Bucharest in the Eastern Balkans about a month ago, in April This indirectly as well as directly connects to the drawing of the frontiers of Europe concept – when have we had enough? Is there a natural ‘geographical fatigue’, to coin a concept, to the enlargement of Europe, which is something a lot of member-States and intellectuals actually appear to believe in Europe? The issue, as framed, is: where does Europe end There is, of course, much more to it than mere geography Does Europe end, in Realpolitik terms, when challenging Russia brings risks believed to be bigger than the benefits of accession are deemed to be? Or does it end when culturally, as some people say, or religiously, as some other people say, Europe is not Europe anymore? In other words, can we really say that the European part of Turkey, because it is mostly Muslim, is not really European, and it’s “Asian” part is not European at all ? Well, I cannot but think of how that will sound once BosniaHerzegovina, the Kosovo, and Albania come into the EU The line of argument will fall through its own feet as it were… Lastly, EU enlargement as part of the coordinated dance with NATO, the pièce de résistance of what I wanted to say Let me stress this again First, de facto, there was an explosion into 28 members of one and 27 of the other These two explosions were famously characterized as big bangs These big bangs were rather neatly synchronised Why should that be so? What does this convergence spell? Is it really there? In order to see the synchronization I am alluding to, start geographically in the North and progressively move South, in a mental exercise Norway is not a member of the EU, since it voted twice against the hypothesis in internal referenda; but it is a founding, and fairly active, member of NATO South of it, there are Sweden and Finland; Sweden and Finland, of course, are members of the EU and, because of the different sorts of neutrality they exhibit, they're not members of NATO It's not unlikely that Finland might, because Finnish public opinion is for it, come into NATO this year or next Sweden, although Carl Bild wants it, probably will not, because Swedish public opinion is against it South of this you have the three Baltics who came into NATO and then into the EU together, at pretty much the same time, one and half years distance, all three of them At right angles to the Baltic trio, of course, you have Poland, which came into NATO and the EU pretty quickly At right angles, so with a breach there Behind the breech there is the Ukraine, which is of course a candidate for NATO, and a potential candidate for the EU as well South of Poland we have the Czech Republic which came into the EU and NATO pretty much at the same time South of the Czech Republic you have Slovakia, which came into the EU and NATO at the same time with the big bangs, in what I called a form of coordinated dancing South of this you have Hungary, which came into NATO and the EU as well Then you have, to the right if you look at the map with your head to the North of course, standing on your feet, you have Romania and Bulgaria, who came into NATO and the EU one year and a half away And then Slovenia (to the left, in our mental map) came into NATO and the EU, for the first time establishing geographical continuity of the both the Union and the Atlantic Alliance with Greece Then there is a pocket there – the WB – which is in neither NATO nor the EU, although some of them are candidates for these two Then at right angles with the breach, we have Turkey: which of course is a member of NATO and wants to become a member of the EU, so we, so the Americans, although not all the EU member states At right-angles, behind the breach, what is there? There is, of course, Georgia, which is a candidate for both NATO and the EU Is this accidental? Clearly not Clearly NATO and the EU are twin birds flying together here This twinship is actually very clear Bear with me, as I mostly repeat what I said earlier It takes no real stretch of the imagination to look at Stability and Association Agreements as being actual lateral equivalents of the Membership and Accession Plans (MAPs) that we heard so much about last month in NATO There are the conditionalities for accession for both MAPs and SAAs are very similar In 1995, William Perry and the Clinton Administration introduced five conditions for accession into NATO which are, quite clearly, within the military domain and the political domain, twins of the EU ones Moreover, the Partnership for Peace and the European Neighborhood Policy are clear akin, at a higher level of abstraction; read the documents together and this becomes patent I am aware that I am making a rather sweeping claim here, and that it is that the EU and NATO are only partly dissociable from each other To be sure, they are treated in different places (although in the same city, Brussels) and they were born by means of different documents; even in Universities they are sometimes treated in different departments, et pour cause: one is a military alliance, the other is a political, economic entity But they are de facto twins Again, it is not very easy to see that they are twinned because NATO includes Norway, Turkey, the US and Canada, who are not EU countries, and some of the EU countries are not (Sweden and Finland, I repeat, are two obvious examples of this) in the Atlantic Alliance But twinned they are Can we go further? The de facto synchronised accession I talked about already, the priority given to NATO over the EU, is essential and it shows how much hard power strategic thinking is actually behind it You stabilize first by stipulating sine qua nons, slapping on conditions for democratization, then guaranteeing association, i.e accession, i.e membership of the same political community That is surely what I, or anyone minimally reasonable, would if we were designers of these momentous processes To close my comments, allow me to try and bring all these constraints together To cap this off, what is really the meaning, for the WB, of “the EU absorption capacity”? My guess is that the EU is indeed ready and willing for a WB accession in a fast-track, although maybe an accession which will take place at different speeds as concerns sub-regions; Serbia’s speed will probably be greater than that of most other WB States Such accessions are in the interests of the EU; such accessions are in the interests of NATO as well Although guessing the future is well nigh impossible, that is certainly a safe enough bet Again, I believe looking at this negatively brings it out clearly Leaving a non-Community enclave in the heart of Europe would be immensely risky given Europe's more turbulent neighbourhoods south – with the rise of political Islam – and east – with the reaffirmation of Russia's pride with the rise of oil prices and Putin's achievement of a new measure of central control of the Russian government My point is very easy to enounce Given these problems in our vicinity, it would be particularly dangerous for Europe to allow an enclave to be there which has Muslim countries in it and also umbilical connections to Russia It would be silly, from the point of view of Europe, to let that happen – to allow the WB to remain outside It would be particularly silly because, in Europe, we rightly historically perceive the WB as a rather explosive area So Europe would never go for the idea of leaving a free-wheeling dangerous enclave here to fend for itself, given the instability that might cause The WB will come into Europe soon It is largely up to Serbia how soon soon means Regional ownership also means regional responsibility The ball is mostly on the Serbian side ... to the right if you look at the map with your head to the North of course, standing on your feet, you have Romania and Bulgaria, who came into NATO and the EU one year and a half away And then... for the last few years: the EU and NATO expand in tandem But this has not happened randomly Note that in virtually every case, in the last half-dozen years or more, NATO was first and then the EU,. .. talk about the Ukraine and Georgia As we all well know, the Ukraine and Georgia are in much more dire straits as far accessions into both the EU and NATO are concerned then the ones the WB States