No welcome for Serbia in the EU
Nations within the European Union are hardening their attitudes towards migrants from those eastern European countries that have recently joined, or soon hope to join, the EU. Meanwhile the western Balkans, though promised entry, have been left to wait.
By Chris J Bickerton
REFERENDUMS were organised in 2005 in France and the Netherlands on the proposed European Union constitution, and in both the no campaigns won by sizeable margins. At the heart of the campaigns were debates about enlargement of the EU after the arrival of 10 new members in 2004. The image of the Polish plumber, the incarnation of collective ideas about cheap eastern European labour flooding the market of old Europe, expressed the reservations about enlargement.
The immigration debate has become lively again recently. In Britain, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Poles since 2004 has provoked calls for a restriction of eastern European immigration, and members of the Labour government have already promised tighter restrictions on future jobseekers from Romania and Bulgaria. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy, frontrunner in France’s 2007 presidential election, has reiterated his doubts about further enlargement.
National politicians have responded to immigration fears by reconsidering their commitment to further enlargement. Some countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria, are too far along the process of accession for any U-turn. At the end of September the EU Commission recommended in its final progress report that Romania and Bulgaria join in January 2007. But both countries have faced tighter EU demands on anti-corruption measures, organised crime and agriculture (1). Other countries have not been given any fixed dates for their entry into the EU. This has left the door open to long negotiations, where measures may be introduced to stem the fears of populations within member states. In France, future enlargements will probably be subject to national referendums.
In Serbia, enlargement fatigue is a serious problem for some. Ksenija Milivojevic, the secretary general of the European Movement in Serbia, thinks that while the basic framework of conditionality and negotiations will not change, negotiations over entry will take more time. She thinks, too, that the differences between first- and second-class membership, where access to all EU funds and institutions is not open to all members, will grow.
Doubts back home
Jovan Ratkovic, Serbia’s presidential adviser on European affairs, also feels that the EU is falling short of its commitment to a full membership perspective. He believes the EU should demonstrate its commitment to the integration of the western Balkans by extending the Thessaloniki promise of 2003. However, in the context of the evolving relationship between the EU and Serbia, and under the present conditions of enlargement fatigue, there are fears that the EU may not even honour that promise.
Oliver Dulic, chairman of the European Integration Committee of the now-defunct parliament of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro (2), remains pessimistic. In June 2003, at the joint European Council and western Balkans meeting in Thessaloniki, the EU offered the Balkans its “unequivocal support to the European perspective of the western Balkan countries”. It also stated clearly that “the future of the Balkans is within the European Union”.
The reasons behind this reaffirmed commitment to Balkans membership of the EU are clear. Greece had the presidency of the EU in the first half of 2003 and, for its own reasons of regional stability and influence, placed closer integration of the western Balkans at the top of its list of priorities. In March 2003 the pro-reform prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated. According to Milica Djilas, a professor at Belgrade’s faculty of political science, the killing was a formative moment for the EU. It signalled to Brussels that reform in Serbia was not inevitable and needed to be supported from the outside.
Dulic observed that, since Thessaloniki, little has been done to reassure the western Balkans. Recent attempts to reaffirm the Thessaloniki promise have been made with little fanfare, as if the EU had something to hide. The British presidency of the second half of 2005 organised nothing for the western Balkans. The Austrian presidency of the first half of 2006, widely touted as an opportunity to push the EU’s western Balkans agenda forward, only heightened speculation about flagging support for enlargement within the EU.
There was no high profile western Balkans summit. Instead, the enlargement agenda was discussed at a two-day, informal meeting in Salzburg in March. While the Austrian foreign minister, Ursula Plassnik, stated that “European unification is incomplete without the Balkans”, there was also much talk of the “absorption capacity” of the EU (3). For Dulic, the difference in tone between Thessaloniki and Salzburg was a sign that enlargement had become a cause of trepidation rather than celebration in Europe.
For all this pessimism, fatigue has not overwhelmed the enlargement process. In spite of the postponement of the stabilisation and association agreement (SAA) negotiations, because of Serbia’s failure to hand over Ratko Mladic to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the EU Commission is keen to maintain contractual relations with Serbia. It uses any opportunity it has to engage with the ministries in Serbia on issues of legal harmonisation with EU standards. It also continues to make full use of the enhanced permanent dialogue meetings, which are the only formal instance that remains for dialogue between the EU and Serbia now that the SAA negotiations have been put on hold (4).
A Potemkin village
Some conclude from this that enlargement fatigue only applies to Europe’s national politicians. While the EU Commission and its directorates take the lead on enlargement, the member states drag their feet. A simple explanation is that the Commission’s isolation from the European public enables it to move forward on unpopular dossiers; national leaders are far more conscious of public opinion, and have less room for manoeuvre.
The former foreign minister of Serbia, Goran Svilanovic, has little time for the idea of enlargement fatigue. He claims it reflects Europe’s inability to adapt to the challenge of globalisation. This challenge demands that EU member states reform their welfare states, liberalise their labour markets and adapt themselves to outsourcing to India, China and eastern Europe. Rather than confront this reality, EU governments are blaming enlargement. He believes that tensions caused by globalisation take the xenophobic form of the Polish plumber, leaving enlargement a victim of Europe’s internal battle with its own social reform.
Svilanovic is not alone in believing this. Enlargement fatigue is, in the words of another Serbian politician, Gordana Comic, a Potemkin village designed to hide the seedier side of western European politics. The underlying problem is a lack of political will: hiding behind the label of enlargement fatigue, Europe’s elites absolve themselves of responsibility. We can see this by comparing the economics and politics of immigration.
The economic benefit for the EU-15 of the recent 2004 enlargement has been considerable. Britain and Ireland, two countries that opened up their labour markets fully to workers from the new EU member states in 2004, have benefited hugely. A recent study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that 75% of employers in Britain felt that EU enlargement had been good for business, and that migrant workers from eastern Europe did jobs that British-born workers were often unwilling to do (5).
The Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, has argued that cheap immigrant labour has dampened wage inflation, keeping interest rates low. King said in 2005: “In an economy that can call on unlimited supplies of migrant labour, the concept of output gap is meaningless” (6). In Britain there are even discussions around how to take advantage of a new phen-omenon, the Polish pound.
In spite of this, national politicians in EU member states have increased fears of enlargement by hardening their line on immigration. Svilanovic bitterly comments that not all the slabs of the Berlin wall are in museums. He says: “A new Berlin wall is being built around the western Balkans, with it becoming increasingly difficult to obtain visas to travel in the EU.” Visa facilitation remains a dream for Serbia and in Belgrade long queues form outside embassies, with some people sleeping overnight in the hope of obtaining the necessary travel documents. The situation seems to be worsening as neighbouring countries join the EU. Hungary’s entry into the EU in 2004 provoked considerable tensions with the neighbouring Serb province of Vojvodina, which has an important Hungarian minority. The introduction of visas prevented many families from regularly seeing close relatives.
This lack of visa facilitation is a feature of the hardening immigration debate within the EU. A particularity of the direction currently taken by immigration policy is that there is both an introduction of less liberal immigration regimes and a greater tightening of integration requirements. Traditionally, liberal immigration regimes were accompanied by tight integration requirements, and vice versa. Today there is a tightening in both directions.
Svilanovic explains this situation by pointing to the mediocrity of European politicians. He laments that there are no great leaders any more in Europe, echoing François Mitterrand’s claim that: “I am the last great president, after me, there will only be financiers and accountants”. The debate over immigration in Europe reflects the problem of weak political will. Rather than directly combat the racist arguments of the French Front National (FN) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the French Socialists stressed the threat in order to weaken the Gaullist right. Leaders on the right brought the FN’s hard-line immigration stance into the mainstream, most famously in the 1991 comment by Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, about the “noise and smell” of foreigners (7).
There has been a similar approach in other European countries, such as Italy, with the rise of neofascist parties such as Gianfranco Fini’s Allianza Nationale. Instead of recognising their role in heightening immigration fears, Europe’s leaders turn to enlargement fatigue as an excuse for further restrictions.
In Belgrade, enlargement fatigue is believed to be slowing down Serbia’s chances of joining the EU. Enlargement, the EU’s most successful foreign policy, has been transformed into a liability. Only the EU Commission, isolated from European public opinion, still remains firmly attached to the vision of a Balkans enlargement. The view from Belgrade is that responsibility for this lies with Europe’s elites. Public scepticism over enlargement expresses the outlook that the political elites themselves fostered. Those paying the price for this are the people of the western Balkans, whose freedom of movement is today far more limited than it was in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
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