Wag the EU
Borut Grgic. Wall Street Journal.
A lot of time has passed since the bloody war that destroyed Bosnia and Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing campaign against Kosovo's Albanians. But all the progress the region has since made in pursuing a common European future is now in danger as the resolution of Kosovo's future status and Bosnia's police reform are on hold. And the European Union shares a lot of the blame for this. Its "soft-touch" diplomacy in what essentially is still a macho world is showing its limits.
Milosevic yielded only when his hand was forced-twice by NATO interventions. The new Serbian leadership can of course not be compared to that regime. But Belgrade plays a similar type of "blame the EU" game, a Milosevic classic. Western pressure is held responsible for everything bad that happens to the country. If Kosovo gains independence, as the U.S. and some EU countries want, Belgrade warns that Serbian democracy will be doomed. Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica also tells the EU not to push his country on the extradition of war crime suspects to the international court in the Hague because it would supposedly bring the radicals to power. Likewise, Belgrade urges the EU not to insist on ambitious reforms because democracy in Serbia is too fragile to support sweeping changes in judiciary, police and defense matters.
And the EU plays along with it. Strangely, it has now become the EU's responsibility to make Serbia a member of the Union. While Brussels is telling Turkey to change if it wants to get into the EU, Belgrade is telling Brussels it must change its politics if it wants Serbia in Europe. The tail is wagging the dog and it makes Europe look extremely weak, if not outright hypocritical.
It's also complicating the delicate diplomacy to steer Kosovo toward statehood. Kosovo's Albanians will declare independence with or without foreign blessing, but the absence of a united European stance plays into Serb and Russian hands and raises the odds of a messy, if not necessarily violent, end in Kosovo.
There is a parallel situation in Bosnia with respect to the police reforms. The 1995 Dayton peace agreement divided the country after the war into a Serb Republic and Bosniak-Croat Federation. Since then, ethnically divided government structures are being merged, including the army, in an effort to reunite the country. But the police forces are still separate, allowing criminals to escape capture simply by crossing jurisdictions. Bosnian Serbs fear that giving up their police force may lead to the eventual loss of their autonomy.
Again, Europe has allowed Bosnian Serbs to delay the necessary reforms for two years now. With last year's departure of Paddy Ashdown as the international community's high representative for Bosnia, the EU adopted a velvet-glove approach under Mr. Ashdown's successor, Christian Schwarz-Schilling. The new international boss, Miroslav Laicek, is changing the rules. The Slovak diplomat said that the police reform Bosnia's political rivals agreed on Friday doesn't go far enough to justify Bosnia taking the next step toward EU membership.
He is right. Friday's deal doesn't meet the three conditions set forth by the EU: that the police budget and police laws will be handled at state level and that there will be no political interference in the police structures. The EU member countries must now support Mr. Laicek. As long as the police reform is stalled, Bosnia's EU prospects should be put on hold.
The claim that international pressure supposedly threatens democracy makes as little sense in Bosnia as it does in Serbia. If regional leaders in Serbia or Bosnia will be voted out of power, it's not because they lost Kosovo or agreed to a common police structure, but because they failed to raise the standard of living and create new jobs.
The problem is that bad behavior is contagious in the Balkans. If Kosovo turns bloody again, the troubles could spill over. The Kosovo- Macedonia border is not yet settled and Albanians on either side could reignite ethnic turmoil there if pushed on partition. In south Serbia, probably one of the Balkans' poorest regions, Albanians could call for separation to join Kosovo. Kosovo's north, which is predominantly Serb, would probably want to link up with Serbia. This is why even suggesting the partition of Kosovo is so dangerous. It pushes the Balkans a step closer to the ethnic strife, isolationism and corruption of the 1990s.
Unfortunately, EU foreign policy is stuck in the last decade, when Brussels failed to step up to the plate when the Balkans plunged into war and the U.S. eventually intervened. European policy is today held hostage by the narrow-minded interests of individual EU member states. The objections to an independent Kosovo coming from Cyprus, Slovakia, Romania and Spain have little to do with Kosovo and almost everything with these countries' own domestic politics. They are concerned that Kosovo's independence may serve as a precedence for their own problems, be it the failed unification in Cyprus, the calls for more autonomy of Basques and Catalans in Spain and Slovakia's and Romania's failure to successfully integrate their ethnic minorities.
So as a result Russia and the U.S. are calling the shots and muscling the Balkan policy out of the hands of the EU. The U.S. strongly supports Kosovo's independence drive, while Russia backs Belgrade with equal vigor. This puts at risk not only the future of the EU's Balkan engagement but EU foreign policy in general. If Europe is unable to lead in the Balkans, its own backyard, it is unrealistic to expect Europe to lead anywhere, much less be taken seriously.
The Bosnians have now been given a few more days to hammer out a police reform agreement. Serbian and Kosovar leaders, who on Friday held direct talks for the first time in six months, have until Dec. 10 to reach a deal. Brussels must not waver now. The Balkans can't wait forever for the EU to get serious about foreign policy.
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Mr. Grgic is the founding director of the Institute for Strategic Studies in Ljubljana.
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